Industry? Luleå University of Technology 2020 Joel Lööw ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?

DOCTORAL T H E SIS

Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences Division of Humans and Technology

ISSN 1402-1544 ‘Soft’ Questions in ISBN 978-91-7790-625-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-7790-626-1 (pdf) a ‘Hard’ Industry? Luleå University of Technology 2020 Joel Lööw ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?

Sociotechnical Problems of the Mining Industry

Joel Lööw

Human Work Science ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?

Sociotechnical Problems of the Mining Industry

Joel Lööw

Luleå University of Technology Department of Business Administration, Technology and Social Sciences Division of Humans and Technology Printed by Luleå University of Technology, Graphic Production 2020

ISSN ISSN 1402-1544 ISBN 978-91-7790-625-4 (print) ISBN 978-91-7790-626-1 (pdf) Luleå 2020 www.ltu.se Para Mateo y Su

Acknowledgements

By now, I feel it overstated to highlight the fact that writing a thesis, or conducting any research at all, is possible without the help of other people. Many people deserve thanks for, in one way or another, having made this thesis possible—too many, in fact, for all of you to be included here. Instead, I extend this general “thank you”: thank you for pointing me in the right direction (“you should look into pragmatism”); thank you for suggesting, “isn’t this, actually that?”; thank you for involving me, trusting me, challenging me, and encouraging me; thank you for all your support! There are some people that I would like to thank specifically. To my supervisors: Thank you, Jan Johasson, for your insights and guidance, and for pushing me out of my comfort zone and seeing me through. Thank you, Håkan Schunnesson, for a much needed mining-industry perspective and for making me feel welcome in your research group. To the (current and former) PhD students at (what is now) Human Work Science, Engineering Psychology and Product Innovation: Thank you Eugenia, Lisa and Lisa, Angelica, Maria and Maria, Erik, Felix, Sanna, Therese, and Martin! A special thanks to Magnus Nygren for all the discussions and support—during my doctoral studies as well as during my Master’s thesis work. Thank you colleagues and friends at (the former division and current research subject) Human Work Science. For all of those that have read, commented and discussed my texts: Thank you (and apologies for the scattered-minded form that my writings sometimes take)! I would also like to thank all the participants of the research projects that I have taken part in during my doctoral studies. Thank you, family and friends! Finalmente: Mateo y Su, hablo mucho en esta tesis sobre las demandas sociales que debemos poner en relación al trabajo. Ustedes me han enseñado que no hay ninguna forma de trabajo que importa más que ustedes, o que pueda aproximarse a las cosas que más importan en la vida. Su, gracias por tu ayuda, tu apoyo y tu comprensión— sin ello, no podría haber escrito esta tesis. Mateo, gracias por ser vos—sin vos, no podría haber terminado esta obra.

Joel Lööw Luleå, August 2020

Summary

The workplaces of mining industry fail to attract the skills and competences that the industry needs for maintaining its production and, in particular, tackling its future challenges. Some of the challenges that face the mining industry are technical and call for technical solutions: deeper and poorer ore deposits, greater environmental requirements, and lower ore prices, for example. Other challenges are social: the mining industry must secure its social licence to operate and, in particular, its current workforce is ageing at the same time as younger generations seem uninterested in employment in the industry. Yet, these technical and social—“hard” and “soft”— challenges relate in such a way that attempting to solve one question will depend on and be influenced by how other challenges are solved. This thesis argues that most of these challenges have a connection to the workplaces of the mining industry, such that the industry’s ability to provide attractive workplaces will significantly influence how it can overcome its other challenges—meaning, most challenges have social components and require social (soft) interventions as well as technical (hard) interventions. However, the mining industry approaches most of its challenges from a technical perspective and seeks to solve its problems with the help of technology; the workplaces of the mining industry do not have to be unattractive, but to make them attractive requires that the mining industry changes its approach to this question, so that the industry comes to treat the question as one of a sociotechnical process in which “hard” and “soft” issues are given equal attention. The purpose of this thesis is to outline such a process. The thesis seeks to develop an understanding of the interplay of social and technical matters in the mining industry and, through this, how workplaces and technology can be developed so that social and technical systems can come to harmonise. This thesis uses a theoretical framework based in the tradition of sociotechnical design but combines this with insights from social studies of technology, the “travel of ideas” literature and institutional pragmatism. This conceptualisation sees very little division between “hard” and “soft” questions and understands technology to be more than its physical artefacts; technology is the whole of the sociotechnical network that surrounds technology’s development, use and implementation. Technology, in this way, is best understood to be information, meaning that technology’s depiction (technology’s metaphors) has a important influence on final effects of technology. In extension, much can be understood about technology and its purposes (e.g., to im-

iii Summary prove the work environment) by treating technology as ideas and focusing how these ideas travel between different contexts. Such an analysis identifies the perspectives of individuals or actors, and how these perspectives differ, as important components in creating attractive workplaces in the mining industry. The empirical basis for this thesis comes from several projects conducted within and with the mining industry between 2014 and 2020. These projects have included investigations into how the mining industry has worked with safety, as well as the evaluation of work environment effects of new technology, and the providing recommendations for the development of new technology. These projects have entailed the use several different methods: interviews (including workshops) with technology developers, operators, work environment managers, and so on; document studies; and participant observations. The results of this thesis exemplify how technology and the design of workplaces in the mining industry can be conceptualised in the manner suggested by the theoretical framework, highlighting, for example, the constant presence of an interplay between technology and social matters, and how instrumental-rationalistic and institutional logic are present in both cases. The results also show that the way different actors understand technology has an important effect on workplace effects and whether these workplaces emerge as attractive or not. Thus, for technology to be able to address the lacking attractiveness of the mining industry’s workplaces—and in extension, for the mining industry to address its future challenges—requires technology to be developed and implemented using open, transparent, and participatory processes. This thesis contributes an understanding that harmonisation between technical and social systems (as understood in sociotechnical theory) depends on how different actors within these systems view technology, and that systems fail to harmonise when these views do not match. The thesis suggests, in this, that these views go beyond technical function and properties to include norms and values. Tackling the challenges of the mining industry requires rethinking and further developing participatory design and decision-making processes. There will be no one-fit-all solutions nor will single interventions be enough to address the mining industry’s challenges. Instead, the processes surrounding the development and implementation of technology need to further consider individual needs and desires, technical and otherwise; creating attractive workplaces in the mining industry is a humanistic and democratic undertaking.

iv Sammanfattning

Gruvindustrins arbetsplatser lyckas inte attrahera den kompetens och de förmågor som krävs för att industrin ska kunna upprätthålla vare sig sin produktion eller, i syn- nerhet, ta sig an sina framtida utmaningar. Vissa av dessa utmaningar är tekniska och kräver tekniska lösningar: djupare och fattigare mineralfyndigheter, hårdare miljökrav och lägre malmpriser är några exempel. Andra utmaningar är av en social karaktär: gruvföretag måste säkra sitt sociala tillstånd för att bedriva sin verksamhet (social licence to operate), och särskilt finna en lösning på det faktum att dess nuvarande arbetsstyrka blir allt äldre samtidigt som yngre generationer inte ser sin framtid inom gruvindustrin. Samtidigt är dessa tekniska och sociala – ”hårda” och ”mjuka” – frågor sammankopp- lade på ett sådant sätt att hur man väljer att ta sig an en fråga kommer att påverka hur de andra utmaningarna kan lösas. Denna avhandling menar att de flesta utmaningarna har en koppling till gruvindustrins arbetsplatser av ett sådant slag att industrins för- måga att skapa attraktiva arbetsplatser i stor grad kommer att påverka hur de andra utmaningarna kan hanteras – med andra ord att de flesta utmaningarna har viktiga sociala komponenter som kräver sociala (mjuka) så väl som tekniska (hårda) lösningar. Gruvindustrin ser främst på sina utmaningar från ett tekniskt perspektiv och söker således tekniska lösningar. Det finns ingen anledning att gruvindustrins arbetsplatser måste vara oattraktiva, men för att skapa attraktiva arbetsplatser krävs att gruvindustrin anlägger ett nytt angreppssätt och på ett sådant sätt att denna fråga förstås vara en fråga om att upprätta en socioteknisk process i vilken ”hårda” och ”mjuka” frågor ges lika mycket utrymme. Syftet med denna avhandling är att skissera en sådan process – avhandlingen söker att utveckla en förståelse för samspelet mellan sociala och tekniska faktorer i gruvindustrin och genom detta hur industrins arbetsplatser och teknik kan utvecklas på ett sådant sätt att harmoni uppstår mellan tekniska och sociala system. Avhandlingens teoretiska ramverk bygger på den sociotekniska traditionen men kombinerar denna med insikter från sociala studier av teknik (social studies of technology), litteraturen kring hur organisationsidéer ”reser” samt institutionell pragmatism. Denna konceptualisering gör väldigt liten skillnad mellan ”hårda” och ”mjuka” frågor och ser teknik som något mer än dess fysiska artefakter – teknikbegreppet måste inne- fatta de sociala nätverk som ansvarar för skapandet, införandet och användningen av teknik. Med detta synsätt kan teknik närmast liknas med information, vilket betyder att beskrivningar av teknik (teknikens metaforer) blir viktiga för att förstå teknikens slutgiltiga effekt. Till följd av detta kan vi förstå mycket om teknik och dess syften

v Sammanfattning

(t.ex. för att skapa bättre arbetsmiljöer) genom att behandla teknik som vore det idéer och genom att fokusera på hur dessa idéer reser mellan olika kontexter. I en sådan analys blir individers eller aktörers perspektiv, och hur dessa perspektiv skiljer sig åt, viktiga komponenter i skapandet av attraktiva arbetsplatser i gruvindustrin. Avhandlingens empiriska material kommer från flertalet projekt som genomförts i och tillsammans med gruvindustrin mellan 2014 och 2020. Dessa projekt har innefattat studier av hur gruvindustrin har arbetat med säkerhet samt utvärdering av ny tekniks inverkan på arbetsmiljön och framtagningen av rekommendationer för tek- nikutveckling. Dessa projekt har innefattat en rad olika metoder: intervjuer (inklusive workshops) med teknikutvecklare, operatörer, arbetsmiljöchefer osv.; dokumentstu- dier; och deltagande observationer. Avhandlingens resultat exemplifierar hur teknik och utvecklingen av arbetsplatser i gruvindustrin kan konceptualiseras på det sätt som det teoretiska ramverket före- slår och visar t.ex. den konstanta närvaron av ett tekniskt och socialt samspel med instrumentellt-rationella och institutionella logiker. Resultaten visar även att det sätt på vilket olika aktörer förstår teknik har betydande effekter på arbetsplatser och på- verkar huruvida dessa arbetsplatser i slutändan framstår som attraktiva eller ej. Om teknik då ska kunna göra gruvindustrin arbetsplatser mer attraktiva – om gruvindustrin, i förlängningen, ska kunna ta sig an sina framtida utmaningar – krävs att teknik utvecklas och införs i organisationer och på arbetsplatser genom öppna, transparen- ta och deltagande/inkluderande processer. Denna avhandling bidrar med förståelsen att möjligheten till harmoni mellan tekniska och sociala system (så som de förstås i socioteknisk teori) beror på hur olika aktörer inom dessa system uppfattar tekniken och att system misslyckas med att harmonisera när dessa uppfattningar inte stämmer överens. I och med detta föreslår avhandlingen att dessa uppfattningar inte bara inne- fattar teknisk funktion och tekniska egenskaper utan även normer och värderingar. Att ta sig an gruvindustrins utmaningar kräver nya tankesätt och en vidare utveck- ling av deltagande/inkluderande design och beslutsprocesser. Det finns i detta inga universallösningar och enstaka interventioner kommer inte lyckas lösa gruvindustrins utmaningar. Istället måste de processer som omger utvecklingen och införandet av teknik i större utsträckning inkludera individers behov och önskningar, i teknisk och annan bemärkelse – att skapa attraktiva arbetsplatser i gruvindustrin är en humanistisk och demokratisk uppgift.

vi Appended Papers

Paper I: Lööw, Joel. 2018. “An Investigation into Lean Production Practice in Min- ing.” International Journal of Lean Six Sigma 10 (1): 123–42. https://doi.org/10. 1108/IJLSS-07-2017-0085.

Paper II: Lööw, Joel, and Magnus Nygren. 2019. “Initiatives for Increased Safety in the Swedish Mining Industry: Studying 30 Years of Improved Accident Rates.” Safety Science 117: 437–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2019.04.043.

Paper III: Lööw, Joel, Lena Abrahamsson, and Jan Johansson. 2019. “Mining 4.0— the Impact of New Technology from a Work Place Perspective.” Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration 36 (4): 701–7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42461-019- 00104-9.

Paper IV: Lööw, Joel. 2020. “Attractive Work and Ergonomics: Designing Attractive Work Systems.” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science 21 (4): 442–62. https: //doi.org/10.1080/1463922X.2019.1694728.

Paper V: Lööw, Joel. 2020. “Understanding New Mining Technology: Towards Improved Health, Safety and Social Acceptance.” Manuscript submitted to Mineral Economics.

vii

Other Publications

Publication A: Shooks, Malin, Bo Johansson, Eira Andersson, and Joel Lööw. 2014. “Safety and Health in European Mining.” Luleå: Luleå University of Technol- ogy.

Publication B: Lööw, Joel. 2015. “Lean Production in Mining: An Overview.” Luleå: Luleå tekniska universitet.

Publication C: Lööw, Joel, and Jan Johansson. 2015. “An Overview of Lean Produc- tion and Its Application in Mining.” In Proceeding Mineral Resources and Mine Development, 121–36. Aachen, Germany.

Publication D: Lööw, Joel, and Jan Johansson. 2015. “Work Organisation for Attrac- tive Mining: Lean Mining and the Working Environment.” In Proceedings Third International Future Mining Conference, 197–204. Sydney: AusIMM.

Publication E: Abrahamsson, Lena, Joel Lööw, Magnus Nygren, and Eugenia Segerst- edt. 2015. “How to Get at Social Licence to Mine.” In Proceedings Third International Future Mining Conference. Sydney: AusIMM.

Publication F: Abrahamsson, Lena, Joel Lööw, Magnus Nygren, and Eugenia Segerst- edt. 2016. “Challenges in Obtaining a Social Licence to Mine.” AusIMM Bulletin December 2016.

Publication G: Lööw, Joel, Bo Johansson, and Eira Andersson. 2016. “Designing the Safe and Attractive Mine.” Luleå: Luleå University of Technology.

Publication H: Lööw, Joel, Magnus Nygren, and Jan Johansson. 2017. “Säkerhet i svensk gruvindustri: 30 år av sänkta olycksfallsfrekvenser och den fortsatta vägen framåt.” Luleå: Luleå University of Technology.

Publication I: Johansson, Jan, Bo Johansson, Joel Lööw, Magnus Nygren, and Lena Abrahamsson. 2018. “Attracting Young People to the Mining Industry: Six Recommendations.” International Journal of Mining and Mineral Engineering 9 (2): 94–108.

ix Other publications

Publication J: Lööw, Joel, Bo Johansson, Eira Andersson, and Jan Johansson. 2018. Designing Ergonomic, Safe, and Attractive Mining Workplaces. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

x Contents

Acknowledgements i

Summary iii

Sammanfattning v

Appended Papers vii

Other Publications ix

1 Introduction 1 Purpose and Research Questions ...... 7 Study Object and Demarcations ...... 8 On the Design and Structure of the Thesis ...... 10

2 The Projects 13 The EU Projects ...... 18 The Safety Projects ...... 21 Position and Sensor Technology Projects ...... 23 On Some of the Common Themes of the Projects ...... 24

3 The Mining Industry 27 Exemplifying Two Mining Methods ...... 30 Developments in a Mining Company Over Time ...... 33 Health in the Mining Industry ...... 42 Safety in the Mining Industry ...... 46 On Addressing Workplace Issues in the Mining Industry ...... 53

4 Theoretical Framework 57 Sociotechnical Thought: Humanistic and Democratic Workplaces ..... 58 Sociotechnology and Attractive Workplaces ...... 62 An Extended Notion of Technology ...... 65 Technology as the Travel and Implementation of Ideas ...... 70 The Location and Interaction of Actors ...... 74

xi Contents

5 Methods, Material, and Process 77 On Using Qualitative Data ...... 78 Verbal Data: Interviews and Workshops ...... 80 Observational Data: Industry Interaction and Field Studies ...... 89 Textual Data: Document Studies ...... 90 On Selecting Sources and Gaining Access ...... 92 Analysis: Conceptualising the Thesis as a Case Study ...... 94 Ethical Considerations ...... 97

6 Summary of Appended Papers 99 Paper I: A Management Concept’s Journey to the Mining Industry ..... 99 Paper II: Technology for Increasing Mining Industry Safety ...... 103 Paper III: Outcomes of New Technology in Mining ...... 106 Paper IV: On Designing Technology to Increase Workplace Attractiveness . 108 Paper V: On the Handling of New Technology in Mining ...... 111

7 Discussion and Conclusions 115 A Sociotechnical Analysis of the Papers ...... 115 Paper I ...... 116 Paper II ...... 117 Paper III ...... 120 Paper IV ...... 122 Paper V ...... 123 On Creating Attractive Workplaces as a Sociotechnical Process .... 124 Conclusions—and on Limitations, Generalisability, and Contribution ... 129

References 135

xii Chapter 1 Introduction

The workplaces of mining industry fail to attract the skills and competences that the industry needs for maintaining its production and, in particular, tackling its future challenges. The current workforce of the mining industry is ageing, and younger generations seem uninterested in employment in the industry (Lee 2011; Oldroy 2015). However, there is no reason that the workplaces of the industry must be unattractive—it is fully within the industry’s capacity to create attractive places of work. To enable such attractiveness, the mining industry must change its approach to the subject, itself. The industry must come to treat the endeavour of creating attractive workplaces as a sociotechnical process, viewing “hard” and “soft” issues equally. The purpose of this thesis is to outline such a process and, in extension, an understanding of the creation of attractive workplaces in the mining industry. A sociotechnical approach means the consideration of both technical and social aspects in all undertakings. Such a perspective treats “soft” and “hard” questions as equally important, understanding that the questions interdepend in such a way that attempting to solve one question will depend on and be influenced by how other challenges are solved. The need for such a perspective is materialised by the reality that presents itself to the industry. The mining industry faces a changing world that imposes new, dual demands on how the industry must conduct its operations. Deeper and poorer ore deposits, greater environmental requirements, and lower ore prices, are but a few significant, technical and “hard,” challenges that the industry faces (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Johansson 2009). But the social landscape surrounding the mining industry has also changed; most notably, the mining industry must now manage its social impacts. Social impact management is often termed as the industry’s need to secure its social licence to operate (Abrahamsson et al. 2016; Segerstedt and Abrahamsson 2019; Poelzer et al. 2020). However, the industry must also attract a future workforce, and one with a different set of competences and new expectations regarding work (Johansson et al. 2018). These are social challenges. Outside of these developments, the health and safety record of the industry still occupies the minds of society and the industry, alike. The ultimate, dire consequences of shortcomings in these situations are social. This thesis suggests that addressing current and future challenges of the mining industry must clearly include the development of its workplaces. In fact, I will ar-

1 Chapter 1 Introduction gue that addressing the creation of attractive workplaces, both in particular and as a whole, will also address many of the other challenges the mining industry faces; truly attractive workplaces involve several issues, both inside and outside the “company gates” (cf. Abrahamsson et al. 2016). Here, as we will see, a siloed approach to problem solving, addressing only one or a few issues at a time, is insufficient; contex- tualising problems in relation to workplace attractiveness provides a more conducive, productive framing. Reviewing, briefly, the issue of health and safety in the mining industry gives perhaps the most illustrative example of how these and other issues interrelate, along with the relevance of adapting a broader workplace perspective. Safety remains one of the top items on the agendas of mining companies (e.g., SIP STRIM 2019; Ventyx 2013). In prioritising safety, the mining industry has, indeed, managed to lower its number of accidents. In fact, the mining industry has lowered its accident rate more than most other industries, over the years. Accidents in mining companies in the European Union decreased by a third between 1999 and 2007, while for all sectors this decrease was only around ten per cent (European Commission 2010). The trend looks similar in other countries.1 However, these efforts have not been enough. Someone working in the mining industry is several times more likely to suffer a fatal accident, compared to the average worker (e.g., Lilley, Samaranayaka, and Weiss 2013).2 Elgstrand and Vingård (2013, 6) reported that, “Where reliable national statistics exist, mining is generally the sector

1The European Commission (2010) use the measure “workers reporting one or more accidental injuries at work or in the course of work in the past 12 months” to identify this trend. Figures for non-fatal accidents are more difficult to determine than fatal accidents; due to reporting differences, international comparisons for non-fatal accidents are rare. Other sources also show an improved accident rate. The number of accidents per 1,000 employees in Sweden in 1998 in mining was 30.4 for metal-ore mines (16.9 for other types of mining), and 9.1 for all sectors (Swedish Work Environment Authority 2000). In 2017 this figure was 12 for mining and 7 for all sectors (Swedish Work Environment Authority 2018). Thus, the accident 12 12 rate decreased 1− 30.4 ≈ 60% (or 1− (30.4+16.9) ≈ 50% if considering all mines) in mining, while ( 2 ) 7 it decreased 1 − 9.1 ≈ 23% in all sectors. However, this not always is the case. In Brazil, for example, between 1999 and 2009 accidents decreased more in the average sector than in mining (Faria and Dwyer 2013). 2Figures such as these are difficult to determine. Lilley, Samaranayaka, and Weiss (2013) compared (non-standardised) fatal occupational injury incidence rates (per 100,000 person years) between New Zeeland, Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. The resulting mean fatal injury rate of the mining industry of these countries was 17.6, and the mean 17.6 for all industries was 2.5. (Thus 2.5 ≈ 7. Note, however, that these figures are from 2005–2008. These figures are also non-standardised; the rate is likely higher than these figures show.) By comparison, for non-fatal accidents in Sweden, around 13 accidents occurred per 1000 employees in mining. For all industries, this figure is around 7 (Swedish Work Environment Authority 2017). Thus, the accident rate of the Swedish mining industry is almost double that of the average industry.

2 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ having the highest, or among 2–3 highest, rates of occupational fatal accidents and notified occupational diseases.” What is troublesome is that in many countries the rate of improvement in regards to accidents has slowed down, such that the mining industry’s accident rate remains somewhat stable yet elevated. The most basic requirement for an attractive workplace is that it is safe and healthy (Johansson, Johansson, and Abrahamsson 2010). The common tactic for ensuring safety and health in the mining industry has been to use technical solutions, such as improved machines, rock bolts, and so on (Lööw and Nygren 2019; Blank, Diderich- sen, and Andersson 1996; Hartman and Mutmansky 2002). In later years, at least in Sweden, efforts have started to focus on organisational measures, such as safety culture, to meet these needs. The present situation in the industry shows, however, that current efforts in health and safety are not enough. A lack of concurrent attention to both technical and social issues, in part, explains this shortcoming. The Swedish mining industry, itself, acknowledges that addressing this lack in breadth of focus is necessary for safety to continue to improve (Lööw and Nygren 2019). This is not to say that technology does not have a central role in the future improvement of safety in the industry. For example, more complex ore bodies found at greater depth, and that might even be located on the ocean floor (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Johansson 2009), likely means that automation and remote-control are the only feasible solutions to ensure even a basic level of health and safety. Yet, technical solutions such as automation can worsen safety if that technology is developed departing from faulty assumptions about its intended operators (e.g., Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011); this can happen if social factors are not considered in the design of technology. New technology also requires new qualifications. Thus, one the one hand, the industry must improve safety to become more attractive. But on the other hand, the industry must become more attractive to become safe. Safety, in this sense, is not only a prerequisite for attractive workplaces; attractive workplaces are a prerequisite for safety.3 The interdependence between attractive workplaces and other issues within the industry affects not only safety; providing attractive workplaces is also a question of being able to produce. Lee (2011, 323) argued:

A shortage of qualified miners in all types of positions is a critical issue in many countries and regions of the world. During the last decades, as

3Some research has found that work practices that many people consider attractive (group work, for example; Åteg and Hedlund 2011) also contribute positively to safety (Zacharatos, Barling, and Iverson 2005); some of this research was conducted within the mining industry (Goodman and Garber 1988). Additionally, to note, an increased diversity in mining may mean that some of the knowledge regarding safety in the industry will have to be revised. Thus, improving safety also means better understanding the industry’s new or potential workforce.

3 Chapter 1 Introduction

mining declined, the work force was not replaced. … many companies are unable to meet demands because of the severe labor shortage. People currently employed in mining are retiring, and there is a lack of younger people to fill the vacancies.

PwC (2012) note cases where mining labour productivity has decreased by 50 per cent since 2001,4 and that productivity continues to decrease. This means that even maintaining production requires more people. Other challenges faced by the mining industry—lower grade orebodies, increased international competition, mining at greater depths (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Johansson 2009)—all put additional demands on efficient production. In general, striving for increased productivity tends to push an organisation towards less safe operations (Rasmussen 1997). Or, high-hazard operations require more protection “per unit of production” (Reason 1997), which would make these operations less productive. In either case, more labour will be required to maintain production and safety. Technology can increase productivity by improving the capacities of machines (Hartman and Mutmansky 2002), for example. However, to date there have been few, if any, revolutionary technological developments in terms of productivity (Bar- tos 2007; see also Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. 2002) in mining. Thus, increases in productivity are likely to be incremental, and it is not clear if these will be enough to offset the impediments on production introduced by the other developments mentioned. Historically, in the mining industry, changes in labour practices and the organisation of work have been important for increased productivity, as well (Bamforth and Trist 1951; Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. 2002). But the mining industry, at least when compared to other industries, lacks experience with the industrial engineering techniques implied by such practices (Cavender 2000).5 Not only does this mean, then, that mining organisations lack an avenue for increasing productivity, but many of these “softer” techniques of improvement (e.g., broader work roles; Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. 2002) are attractive work practices (Åteg and Hed- lund 2011).

4PwC (2012) refer to Australian figures and they note the complexity in explaining the decline. They use, as their definition of labour productivity, value generated per hour worked. Thus, reasons for the decline in productivity include both increased capital investments and improved trade, but also skill shortages. 5It sounds contradictory that the mining industry has used organisational techniques to improve productivity but at the same time remains inexperienced in this approach. For now, simply note that these organisational measures, to an extent, may not have been deliberate on the part of the industry. In the high-productivity workplaces that the Tavistock Institute (founders of sociotechnical theory) examined, it was the workers themselves who had organised the work in such a way (e.g., Bamforth and Trist 1951). Similarly, Schmitz Jr. (2005) argued that the increases in productivity was due to changed work practices.

4 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Matters outside the workplaces of the mining industry also influence mining companies’ ability to attract new labour—even external issues depend on and influence workplace attractiveness. If safety is not what is most commonly associated with mining, then probably its environmental impact is.6 Some environmental impact of mining is inevitable, to the extent that mining activities extract minerals from the ground. Still, the long-term sustainability of the environment demands minimisa- tion of this impact. The mining industry’s progress on this matter will influence how people come to view the industry, overall—a view that will also influence people’s willingness to work for the industry. At the same time, the materials that make up modern, sustainable technology must be mined: lithium for batteries, for example, or steel, copper, and rare earth elements for wind turbines. Metals also have higher recyclability than other materials such as plastics (Sandström, n.d.). So, even while all negative environmental impact cannot be avoided, that impact can positively contribute to offsetting negative impacts in other places, which could, in turn, positively influence the view on the mining industry. Which technology is to be implemented at a workplace-level in the mining industry will depend also on how well its environmental impact is managed elsewhere. For example, some mining companies currently experiment with using battery-powered machines—that is, reducing the amount of CO2 emitted while leaving the extraction process intact. Not only can this technology decrease CO2 emissions; it can also improve the work environment by reducing noise and diesel exhaust. Both developments could positively influence the attractiveness of the mining industry, from an external perspective. However, this development is far from simple. Previous studies (e.g., Dunstan 2016) have found that electrically powered machines have not been unequivocally positively received by mineworkers. From an external perspective, additionally, some people see battery-powered machines as introducing additional risks (Lööw et al. 2018; Jäderblom 2017). This is to say, then, that technology must be attractive to ensure its usage, and that usage, in turn, may be critical for ensuring that the workplaces themselves appear attractive to others. Finally, it is important to remember that increased energy intensity in mining has coincided with an improved work environment. Mechanisation and automation have contributed to making mining work safer, but such progress has, thus far, also required more energy consumption;7 for example, even a diesel-powered truck is better than

6Natural resource extraction and processing emit, in total, 50 per cent of all greenhouse gases. This figure includes oil extraction and coal mining, as well as processing such as in the making of steel. In the iron and steel making sectors, less than ten per cent of CO2 emissions comes from mining (Oberle et al. 2019). In turn, the metals sector is itself responsible for 10 per cent of total emissions. 7In general, more machines and technology imply increased energy use. Between 2005 and 2017, in Sweden, energy use in mining and manufacturing (mining is not reported separately in these figures) rose from around 4,125 GWh to 6,400 GWh (Energimyndigheten 2006, 2018) (note that the classification system changed in 2008, so a full comparison is not possible). Of course, not all

5 Chapter 1 Introduction manually hauling ore. And energy use can be decreased by lowering ventilation or increasing manual labour, of course, but those changes are hardly desirable solutions. These matters, of sustainability and influence on the image of the mining industry, connect and extend to social (and economic) sustainability (cf. Abrahamsson et al. 2015; Segerstedt and Abrahamsson 2019), which, in turn, includes safety and health at work. A mine must not expend the social capital of its surrounding society (Hor- berry, Burgess-Limerick, and Fuller 2013), as some phrase it. The consideration of social capital must include the creation of attractive workplaces. The inability of recruiting local labour may mean that mining companies start to employ unsustainable practices, such as fly-in/fly-out labour (Lööw et al. 2018).8 Employment opportunities also have a clear influence on social and economic sustainability (cf. Segerstedt and Abrahamsson 2019). The ability of mining companies to recruit labour—the ability to provide attractive places of work—affects productivity. In this way, attractive workplaces additionally affect social sustainability. Yet, mining companies’ work with social sustainability tends to put focus only on what goes on “outside the gates” (Abrahamsson et al. 2016, 2015). The following is, perhaps, a succinct summary of the social problems of the mining industry, in general: The mining industry must recruit labour from outside its gates. The main strategy is, thus, to enact changes from the gates outwards—information campaigns in schools, use of more environmentally friendly technology,9 and so on. However, effects from what happens in the mining workplaces also ripple through and beyond the gates. Similarly, decisions regarding the work environment are influenced by what goes on outside the gates, for example which issues are considered most important at the moment, and so on. The common theme here—indeed, the theme common within this thesis—is that approaching the challenges of the mining industry with technology first, as solution among the various ways to approach the challenges, risks exacerbating the problems. The handling of social issues is different from the handling of technical issues; there is no a priori test for social effects in the same way one may predict the stability of a mine face. It is only through interaction with those whom the social effects affect, that social impact be understood. For example, while the mining industry deploys new technology so as to be less dependent on (local) labour (specifically, remote-control technology; PwC 2012; Albanese and McGagh 2011; Lever 2011), this technology

energy use generates greenhouse gases. In fact, the metal industry in Sweden has decreased their greenhouse gas emissions (almost by half between 1990 and 2017; Naturvårdsverket 2018). 8Fly-in/fly-out solutions need not be unsustainable, per se, however current practices as such tend to be so. At the same time, some mines can only be sustained (e.g., economically) with the use of such a workforce (e.g., Abrahamsson et al. 2016). 9For the latter, I am referring to battery-technology and the like. Even if there are arguments surrounding the improved work environment and these machines, decreased CO2 emissions and energy-saving are the main motivations for their use (see Paper IV).

6 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ will likely require a workforce that is more qualified than the workforce has been traditionally (see Abrahamsson and Johansson 2006). Yet, paradoxically, new technology risks removing aspects of work that the current workforce considers attractive, while solidifying other aspects that keep a new workforce out. Therefore, the statement that the creation of attractive workplaces requires a sociotechnical approach and full consideration of “the social” extends well beyond the current workplaces and its workers; this thesis argues for the adapting of workplaces to a wider, more diverse labour force. With the example of remote-control technology, if the industry does not make a wide consideration of “the social,” this new technology, which would grant access to a new labour force, may only be attractive to a sample of all potential employees. Even if a wider section of this workforce were to be convinced to seek employment in the industry, a lack of their inclusion in design may result in unsafe operation—then, attractiveness will decrease again. Similarly, new, high-tech technology can lessen the environmental impact of mining, but if the mining industry cannot secure the labour needed to operate this new technology, it may have to use older technology for which it can ensure the appropriate skills. Or, the industry will have to rely on a fly-in/fly-out workforce. The former solution will leave the workplaces of the industry unchanged and, thus, still unattractive. The latter solution can also preclude those characteristics of work that people find attractive and may, in a broader perspective, lead to a less attractive industry-affected society, overall. The point here is to solidify the fact that, while mining and other industries draw a dividing line between hard and soft questions, technical issues implicate social factors and vice versa. Not only does the demarcation between technical and social factors ignore the important connection between the two areas, it also puts technical matters above social matters in practice—the practice common to most industries, namely of putting soft questions into the “sidecar” (Frick 1994; see also, for example, Hasle, Seim, and Refslund 2019). This thesis will show that there is a constant interaction between social and technical, soft and hard, issues; it is this sociotechnical interplay that is of interest in this thesis, along with the process from which attractive workplaces can emerge.

Purpose and Research Questions

The purpose of this thesis is understanding the sociotechnical process that forms the workplaces of the mining industry. In this vein, the thesis seeks to outline a procedure in support of the creation of attractive workplaces within the industry.10 By extension,

10In pragmatic terms, this is a task of forming a philosophy of attractive workplaces, a theory of the creation of such places of work. Where pragmatists have argued for the need of theories before (e.g., Dewey 1997, 28–29), their motivations have been that present endeavours cannot rely on “established traditions and institutional habits.” The motivations for a “philosophy” of attractive

7 Chapter 1 Introduction this must be an understanding of technology transfer; no part of the workplace is separate from technology, just as no part is separate from the social (which follows directly from a sociotechnical perspective). At the same time, we may change the technical, whereas we should not change the social; therefore, the process must focus on technology and, in a wide sense, its use. The use of technology within the mining industry involves moving technology, physically and otherwise, from its place of development to its place of use, and then ensuring that use; all-in-all, it is a journey that shapes the technology (Eveland 1986). This transformation is a process without a clear end or beginning, and necessitates a change in focus from technological content to that very process itself: “the key problem should be less choosing and implementing the ‘right’ technology than it is developing and putting into place a procedural set for making technology choices intelligently” (Eveland 1986, 317). That is, “A … system that can facilitate change processes rather than sell specific technologies is one that will have long-term success” (Eveland 1986, 318). Thus, research must “help organizations understand that they have the power to make good choices, and help them understand the implications of those choices” (Eveland 1986, 318). On this basis, this thesis seeks to answer the following research questions:

How can the creation of attractive workplaces be understood from a sociotechnical perspective?

How does a change process that can facilitate attractive workplaces function?

How does technology function to facilitate attractive workplaces?

Study Object and Demarcations

The mining industry is the object of study of this thesis, and the reasons for this are many. Some reasons are practical: the research projects that have informed this thesis have been based in the mining industry. But the mining industry is also an interesting subject matter itself: other industries do not have to manage a social license to operate in the same way the mining industry has to; the way technology “works” in the industry is markedly different from other industries, so solutions from other

workplaces look much the same: the old ways do not work sufficiently well, and contexts have changed such that previous wisdom cannot necessarily be relied upon. A pragmatic theory, then, “affords positive direction to selection and organization of appropriate … methods and materials” (Dewey 1997, 30), much like what we may expect from a process that can support the creation of attractive places of work.

8 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ industries are not readily applicable to the mining industry; nature (i.e., the “mountain”) imposes important restrictions on mining operations in a manner that it does not do in other industries. A focus on the mining industry is important in that the industry’s workforce remains highly susceptible to accidents and ill-health compared to other industries (as discussed above). The problems of lacking attractiveness are greater in mining, and the same problems can result in more extensive effects than in other industries. Lastly, because technological solutions for health and safety do not readily transfer from other sectors to mining, and because lower competition among equipment manufacturers means such factors give less competitive edge (Reeves et al. 2009), one could see the needs of the mining industry as greater than those of other sectors. These themes beg the question, then, of how to define what the mining industry is. Discussions of this nature often center around where the mine, itself, ends. Is the study of the mining industry the study of the hole in the ground? Or does it include the concentrator plant? And so on. Due to the fact that technology occupies a central position in this thesis, the definition of the mining industry cannot be limited only to where most of that technology is used; the definition of the mining industry must include where technology is created, designed, and so on. This means that, in this thesis, I determine the mining industry to consist of mining companies, yes, but also of the suppliers to those companies. Most notably, this means that I view original equipment manufacturers as being part of the industry, as well. That said, there is a clear distinction between mining companies and other companies that are active in the mining industry. A mining company is a company with a mine. In this thesis, the focus will be shared between the mining industry, in general, and specific companies within the mining industry. It is important to realise, however, that it is the mining companies that set the industry apart from other industries more than anything else. Many original equipment manufacturers, for example, do not exclusively deliver to the mining industry. Nor do they necessarily describe themselves as being mining industry companies.11 Still, the focus on mining companies as customers makes for the recognition of particular and important design challenges. Furthermore, the focus of this thesis is on the European mining industry, which has provided much of the empirical material for the study. While later I will argue for the relatively strong attachment of mines to their geographic location, it is difficult to maintain a demarcation that refers to national or continental boundaries. Many mining companies are operated by transnational companies, and even national mining companies have overseas mines. Local and national contexts, laws and regulations, and

11Usually, original equipment manufacturers will have mining divisions that specialise in equipment for the mining industry, though sometimes the equipment that is sold is also for a more general purpose outside of the mining industry. There is at least one exception to this norm: Epiroc went from being a division of Atlas Copco to being its own company solely focused on mining equipment.

9 Chapter 1 Introduction so on, significantly influence mining operations. Still, many mines with international owners derive their practice from both global policies and rules of specific companies. That is, two mining operations in two different countries, but with the same owner, may have more in common than two mining operations in the same country but with different owners. Moreover, to my knowledge, all original equipment manufacturers have a global customer base. The demarcation of the European mining industry, I hold, then, is an empirical delineation rather than an analytical one; I apply this position in my description of a few select companies, then, to infer these accounts to the mining industry, in general. The subject matter of the thesis is the creation of attractive workplaces, and I argue that the process of such a creation is sociotechnical. The focus on the mining industry in and of itself is of relevance, but it should not be seen as a reason for a strict delineation regarding workplace attractiveness. In the first instance, the focus should be seen as a particular cross-section, or segment, of a more general inquiry into to workplace intervention and work environment improvement. Indeed, even if workplace attractiveness encompasses many issues that traditionally could be viewed as being outside of workplace-related investigations, its foundation is still in the improvement of work environments. In approaching the area of work environments with a perspective on workplace attractiveness, such an investigation can also address other pressing, larger-scale issues. In the second instance, the process of creating attractive workplaces is not necessarily specific only to the topic of workplace attractiveness. In particular, by identifying this process as sociotechnical, such a process has bearing on matters that include both technical and social aspects. Meaning, this is also a study of technology: any intervention into workplaces, as this thesis will later expand upon, will be through means of technology. This is another demarcation, then: it is technology that must be adapted and made to work with the social—not the other way around.

On the Design and Structure of the Thesis

This thesis is a product of many, underpinning projects. That is, this thesis has not had one or two projects in which similar research questions were pursued; my PhD studies have been characterised by a number of projects with a common core of relating to the mining industry and its working environment (some projects did not relate to the mining industry, and so they are not included in the thesis). This means that there is no single question that I investigated in-depth over the span of a few years. Instead, this thesis covers a breadth of issues. The projects underpinning this thesis, furthermore, have been both applied and practical in character. The introductory components of this thesis provide a sense of how some of the issues of the mining industry (which are issues that the projects have

10 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

covered) relate. The issues addressed in the thesis are issues that I have encountered, have had to “solve,” and that I found interesting, during the years of my doctoral studies; these are, essentially, issues that I have had to work with over the course of several projects. In this thesis, I try to further add to the understanding of these issues, analysing them under a new theoretical perspective. The corresponding papers to this thesis, then, represent crystallisations, or snap- shots, of my (scientific) progress throughout my PhD studies. They should not be seen, firstly, as products of a carefully-planned and executed research process, moti- vated by, and following an initial, profound research question. Instead, the papers are representative of problems that I was faced with, or trying to understand, at particular times during my studies. This thesis weaves together these years of work in research projects within the mining industry that have had a focus on issues such as the work environment and, also and partly, social sustainability. Therefore, this thesis started with tasks at hand to solve. The underpinning tasks were performed in an academic context and were, thus, solved through such means. At the same time, to start with a practical approach has often meant that the scientific rendering has come afterwards: for example, a project task might have required me to interview people, and only after that has the scientific motivation and resulting importance become clear. Getting a sense of the corresponding underpinning projects of this thesis is important for understanding this thesis as a whole; therefore, the next chapter, Chapter 2, briefly reviews these projects. This next chapter also focuses on the opportunities for data collection activities that presented themselves during the projects. That chapter is then followed by a chapter on the mining industry, Chapter 3. I have argued, thus far, that the mining industry occupies unique positions with regards to, for example, health and safety, as well as the industry’s “natural” restrictions. That chapter will explore some of the “uniqueness” of the mining industry more in-depth, so as to give a sense of the boundaries of an analysis of the industry and its working environments. The exploration I provide concerns, on the one hand, the organisation of mining and its activities. On the other hand, that chapter looks at the health and safety situation of the mining industry. I further argue that there is a close connection between the workplaces of the mining industry, other issues, and the relevance of a workplace perspective. The issues that best highlight this connection are health and safety, allowing for an exploration of both the industry’s workplaces and its technological effects. On that basis, this thesis then continues with its “theory” chapter, Chapter 4; this chapter develops a theoretical framework with its base in sociotechnical theory, but it also takes many cues from institutional pragmatism and social studies of technology. The “methods” chapter, Chapter 5, then follows, and it is here where I detail how the purpose and research questions of this thesis have been pursued. In the “methods” chapter, I take special care in explaining how the different sources of empirical mate-

11 Chapter 1 Introduction rial can be brought forward under one, analytical “umbrella.” Chapter 6 summarises the underpinning papers; in “unifying” the papers, this summary also focuses on the contexts of the papers, themselves. The final chapter, Chapter 7, discusses the results of this thesis, and it provides several conclusions and recommendations as to how the mining industry can facilitate attractive mining workplaces.

12 Chapter 2 The Projects

I have worked within several different projects during my time as a doctoral student.12 The common denominator of these projects is their relation to the mining industry and focus on technology and work environment issues. This chapter reviews these projects to give context to the rest of the thesis. It serves as a prelude to the chapter on the mining industry because, to understand that chapter and the topics it raises, I believe it is helpful to see how the projects have related to those topics. This account presents the projects by themes and, to the extent possible, in chrono- logical order (though many of the projects have run in parallel and overlapped). The focus, furthermore, is specifically on the activities that I have been involved in, and less so on all of the activities of the projects. Especially the EU projects have been extensive and with a clear technological focus—the minute details of these projects are not very informative to the thesis. Tbl. 2.1 summarises the projects and which larger theme each project relates to. Tbl. 2.2 gives a short description of the companies involved in the projects, using generic names; when referring to a specific company in this thesis, I use these generic names.

Table 2.1: The projects of the thesis.13

Theme Project Start End Description

The EU-projects I2Mine 2014 2016 A project for realising the concept of an invisible, zero-impact mine.

12I have not included all projects that I have worked with during this time, only those that relate to the mining industry. This is not to say that the other projects have been unrelated to the topics of this thesis; rather, their influence is less direct than the mining-industry-specific projects.

13 Chapter 2 The Projects

Theme Project Start End Description

SIMS 2017 2020 A project for developing, testing, and demonstrating new innovative technologies for creating sustainable, intelligent mining systems. Positioning and sensor BASIE 2015 2016 A study investigating technology projects how solutions from the health sector can be combined with industrial solutions for work environment monitoring. PosTech 2017 2020 A project aiming towards improving the work environment regarding safety of employees in heavy industries, by using and adapting low- and ultra-precision positioning systems. The safety projects Safety in Swedish 2016 2017 A study that aimed to mining analyse which technological, organisational and regulatory measures have been undertaken to improve safety in the Swedish mining industry. STRIM SAFE 2018 2021 A study investigating good examples of safety work in the Swedish mining industry and which lessons can be extracted from these examples.

14 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Theme Project Start End Description

SAFE MINE 2018 2020 A project aiming to develop a health and safety education programme for PhD students and mining professionals. Other projects (not EBaR 2016 2019 A project aiming to covered by the thesis) develop a a process for recycling alkaline batteries. SWEET 2019 2021 A project aiming to develop a process and machinery for carbon-dioxide free asphalt manufacturing.

Table 2.2: Companies involved in the projects.

Company Project(s) Description

Mining Company A • I2Mine A large Swedish iron ore producer. • SIMS • The safety projects

Mining Company B • SIMS A large Swedish producer of metal • The safety ores such as cooper, gold and silver. projects • PosTech

Mining Company C • SIMS A Finish gold ore producer.

13The listed time span of the projects refers to my participation in the projects. Some projects ran for longer than the interval listed here, such as I2Mine.

15 Chapter 2 The Projects

Company Project(s) Description

Mining Company D • I2Mine A Polish mining company mainly • SIMS producing copper ore.

Equipment Provider A • I2Mine A multi-national manufacturer of mining equipment.

Equipment Provider B • SIMS A Swedish manufacturer of mining equipment.

Equipment Provider C • SIMS A Swedish producer of telecom • PosTech equipment with the mining industry as a big customer.

Equipment Provider D • I2Mine A Swedish producer of robotics and • SIMS control system with the mining industry as a big customer.

Software Compay A • SIMS A Swedish software company with • PosTech customers mainly in the mining industry.

Participation in the projects as a project member—rather than strictly a as researcher—has represented important opportunities for data collection. In particular, opportunity in this context refers to activities such as project meetings, field visits, and so on. Tbl. 2.3 summarises these activities,14 and this chapter, in general, aims to provide a context for them. Tbl. 2.4 shows the connection between the papers and projects.15

14There are two things to note here. First, the summary is only of the activities in the mining-related projects. Second, I have done my best to capture all of relevant activities of note. However, due to the shear amount of activities, it is likely that I have missed some. In particular, many smaller activities— such as brief meetings—are likely to have been missed. Reoccurring activities are not included in the table, either. These, for example, were monthly remote project meetings. While they yielded some data, they were mostly administrative, and their inclusion here would not add much to the understanding of the projects. The account should still give a clear indication of what type of activities were undertaken in the projects. 15This table lists the projects that most prominently feature in the papers. Other project have also had an influence, but that influence has been more indirect.

16 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Table 2.3: Some of the activities of the projects.

Project Occasion Activity

I2Mine June 2014 Project meetings June 2014 Mine visit to Mining Company A June 2014 Interviews with mine planners at Mining Company A July 2014 Interviews and mine visit at Mining Company B October 2014 Project meeting with visit to a copper mine of Mining Company D May 2015 Project meeting June 2015 Field visit to study roadheaders November 2015 Technology demonstration February 2016 Field visit to study mining machine simulators March 2016 Final project meeting Safety in Swedish Mining September 2016 Project meeting, and interview with SWEA. October 2016 Interviews with managers at Mining Company A October 2016 Interview with former workplace inspector November 2016 Interviews with managers at Mining Company B SIMS April 2017 Interviews with technology developers April 2017 Interview with technology developer May 2017 Kick-oﬀ meeting September 2017 Project meeting STRIM SAFE November 2017 Project meeting SIMS January 2018 Interviews with technology developers February 2018 Visit to Mining Company C March 2018 Project meeting in Poland August 2018 Workshop at Mining Company A STRIM SAFE August 2018 Attendance at conference on work environment of the Swedish mining industry

17 Chapter 2 The Projects

Project Occasion Activity

SIMS/PosTech October 2018 Interviews regarding positioning technology SIMS December 2018 Workshop at Mining Company A SAFE MINE December 2018 Project meeting with a ﬁeld visit to a coal mine SIMS March 2019 Project meeting and mine visit at salt mine August 2019 Project meeting

Table 2.4: The projects and their intersection with the papers.

Projects Paper I Paper II Paper III Paper IV Paper V

I2Mine x x x x Safety in Swedish mining x SIMS x x x PosTech x x

The EU Projects

Two EU projects are included within the scope of this thesis, and these projects have provided a large portion of the empirical material for the thesis. The projects were I2Mine (Innovative Technologies and Concepts for the Intelligent Deep Mine of the Future) and SIMS (Sustainable Intelligent Mining System). I2Mine was the project that I was involved in when I was first hired as a research engineer. The official description of the project reads:16

The I2Mine … project marks the start of a series of activities designed to realise the concept of an invisible, zero-impact mine. It will concentrate on the development of technologies suitable for deep mining activities. The I2Mine project will develop the innovative methods, technologies, machines and equipment necessary for the efficient exploitation of minerals and disposal of waste, all of which will be carried out underground. This will dramatically reduce the volume of surface transportation of

16The description is from https://www.eurogeosurveys.org/projects/i2mine/. Emphasis in the original text.

18 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

both minerals and waste, minimising the above ground installations and reducing the environmental impact. … The challenges for the minerals extractive industry are so large and nu- merous that comprehensive international cooperation is needed, both by the industry and wider society, in order to succeed. … … The project will be carried out by a consortium of 26 companies and academic institutions from 10 European countries led by [Mining Company A] from Sweden over a period of 4 years.

My initial task was to help finish a handbook on how to plan and design “The Safe and Attractive Mine” (this task eventually resulted in Lööw, Johansson, and Andersson 2016; it served as a basis for Lööw et al. 2018). Lean production played a central part in this task; a stipulation of the project read that we should combine our results with “overarching Lean production philosophy in a deep mining context.”17 Thus, I began with reviewing lean production in mining (resulting in Lööw and Johansson 2015a). My role in the project also involved evaluating two technologies that the project developed: a roadheader (technically, the cutting head of a roadheader) and a simu- lator. This work involved field visits to see these technologies and interviewing the developers, as well as reviewing relevant literature and finalising with a report. SIMS was the “spiritual successor” to I2Mine. Many of the I2Mine partners were also involved in SIMS. The technology in SIMS was similar to that of I2Mine (though further developed). Research questions were built upon previous themes,18 especially for our part of the project - our work package in SIMS was based on our tasks in I2Mine, although the tasks were more refined in SIMS and applied to specific technologies. In SIMS, the tasks also took a more explicit focus on workplace attractiveness (the name of the work package was “Attractive Workplaces”). In this project, we were to evaluate technologies, offer our advice, and summarise our findings in a handbook.19 The official project summary reads:20

17Taken from the I2Mine Description of Work document. 18There were plans and activities for an official follow-up project to I2Mine, an I2Mine2. However, these never took off. 19The resulting handbook is available online at https://jloow.github.io/wp8-book/index.html; one of its aims is to incorporate some of the ideas that are further developed in this thesis. For example, one notion is that the advice offered in the handbook is subject to change with developments in the industry. We also wanted stakeholders to have a direct way of influencing the handbook. So, if one clicks on the “Edit” or “View Source” links within the handbook, anyone can see and edit the original documents, as well as suggest that their changes be incorporated in the official version. It is also possible to see all previous changed made to the book. 20The text is from the project summary of Grant Agreement of the project. The text has been edited slightly to facilitate reading.

19 Chapter 2 The Projects

The SIMS project aspires to create a long-lasting impact on the way we test and demonstrate new technology and solutions for the mining industry. With a selected consortium ranging from mining companies, equipment and system suppliers, to top-class universities, the SIMS project will boost development and innovation through joint activities aiming at creating a sustainable, intelligent mining system. SIMS aims to develop, test, and demonstrate new innovative technologies that are within the desig- nated consortium, consisting of well-developed mining operations, and selected due to their maturity regarding innovative technologies, world- leading equipment and system suppliers, highly specialized SMEs, and top-class universities. … Objectives

• Efficiency: To increase resource efficiency and competitiveness. • Safety: To reduce the risk of rock falls and exposure of workers to hazardous situations. • Environment: To minimize environmental impact of mining operations. • Trust: To increase public trust, awareness and acceptance for mining.

We … aim to develop, test and demonstrate relevant technologies all aiming at realizing the vision of the intelligent mining system. … We will bring the most innovative new products in the area of mining and test these in a real life environment in the selected test mines.

The full vision of the project may be particularly illustrative:

The European mining industry and EU technology providers are world leaders in safe, lean and green operations and technologies, contributing to the wealth of society by securing raw material supply and EU global technological leadership. Social license to operate is built by trust and the creation of attractive workplaces for men and women.

The SIMS project involved: interviews with operators, technology developers, managers, and so on; several field visits and project meetings; document studies; surveys; and literature reviews.

20 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

The Safety Projects

The first of these projects was a pre-study, Roadmap for reducing accidents in the Swedish mining industry, which eventually resulted in the follow-up project, Strategies and In- dicators for Mine Safety (STRIM SAFE). Both projects were founded by SIP STRIM, Strategic Innovation Programme for the Swedish Mining and Metal Producing Industry. The purpose of the pre-study reads as follows:21 The Swedish mining industry has witnessed a substantial drop in lost time injury frequency rates (LTIFR) in the last 20 years. This is usually attributed to extensive changes in technology (e.g., automation) as well as safety management practices (including changing regulatory demands) and the overall organisation of work. However, the industry is still in need of assessment of the relative impact of each of these changes, as well as how the various factors have affected each other (including the cumulative effect) during the specified time frame. This is important in order to gain a deeper understanding of how future health and safety-related development work may be carried out in the industry. The purpose of the pre-study is thus to analyse which technological, organizational and regulatory changes that have been made that directly or indirectly may have affected the improvement of safety in the mining industry. Based on this initial analysis the foundation for a large-scale innovation project will be mapped out which will analyse the relative and cumulative impact of the identified changes in-depth over the stipulated period, with the aim of creating a road map for the mining industry’s continuing work in creating and sustaining attractive workplaces where health and safety is first on the agenda. This project was conducted in cooperation with Svemin (the industry organisation for mines, mineral and metal producers in Sweden; https://svemin.se). The project involved interviewing eight representatives, from two Swedish mining companies, who had a “managerial connection” to health and safety, as well as a former inspector for the Swedish Work Environment Authority. A workshop with representatives from Gramko (Svemin’s Health and Safety Committee) was also included. In addition to this, we reviewed statistics and, partly, how these statistics were produced. When this study turned into a full-scale project (which is still on-going), its description changed to read:22 The mining industry is traditionally described as dark, dirty and dangerous, which precludes the creation of attractive workplaces within the in-

21The text is from the project application. 22The text is from the project application. Spelling mistakes have been corrected in the cited text.

21 Chapter 2 The Projects

dustry. At the same time the industry has seen significant improvements in terms of safety. Today there is knowledge on what causes mine accidents, but there is a research gap with regards to what actually prevents them, what improves safety. The purpose of this project is to improve the safety of the mining industry based on lessons, experiences and principles of successful national and international examples, with the goal of developing strategies and proactive indicators to improve the safety practices of the industry. Through this the project would contribute to making the industry a safer and more attractive employer. The design of the project maps the safety situation of the mining industry in a first stage. This mapping is based on survey conducted in several Swedish and international mining companies. Through this mapping a number of interesting cases are identified, which are investigated in depth in a second stage. Here successful strategies and practices that contribute to and sustains a high level of safety are identified. In the third stage these descriptions are analyzed, and strategies and proactive/leading indicators for the promotion of safety are developed.

In this ongoing project we looked, and continue to look, at safety programme descriptions, safety policies, results from employee surveys, internal statistics, and so on, to identify potential good examples. We are now at the project stage of investigating these examples in detail. To do so, we will conduct interviews and workshops with people who are connected to the examples, and we will also conduct field visits to the workplaces that are likewise connected. These projects are related to a later project, called SafeMine.23 Its description reads:24

SafeMine aims to develop a holistic and resilient PhD-Programme with a focus on increased mine safety, using the most up to date research data and carrying out studies on industry-driven, real scenarios and projects. Additionally, qualified professionals will be trained to lead the future of health and safety work in the European mining and tunnelling industry based on a modern view of these industries as attractive and safe workplaces. Four leading European mining universities—Clausthal University of Technology (Germany), Luleå University of Technology (Sweden), RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Montanuniversität Leoben

23SafeMine is an EU project. However, I include it here, rather than under the previous heading, because it is thematically closer to the safety projects. 24This description is from the SafeMine website: https://safemine.eu.

22 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

(Austria)—are working closely together with industrial partners in order to develop this PhD-Programme.

The SafeMine project, in other words, is mainly focused on education and developing a health and safety PhD programme. Activities of this project included field visits, industry surveys, and also developing and conducting a PhD education programme on the topic of health and safety.

Position and Sensor Technology Projects

The projects on positions and sensor technology in the mining industry concern, primarily, PosTech (Positioning technology for heavy industry) and BASIE (Body- Area Sensors for Industrial Environments). BASIE was the first and smaller project. Its summary reads:

The study … investigated how solutions in the health sector can be combined with industrial solutions for work environment monitoring. The aim was to evaluate possibilities of creating a system solution with portable sensors that improve personal safety in the industry. … The … study was structured so that several issues could be examined at a basic level. The work was distributed over four main areas; needs, technical solutions, information management and consortium building. The work included: literature review, discussions and meetings with suppliers and possible need industries, idea generating and problem identifying workshops within the research team, and … identifying and testing various solutions for information management.

While the mining industry was not the only industry of concern in the study, data was gathered mainly from that context. PosTech was a similar project. It sought to use the positioning technology in heavy industries. The project summary reads:25

The project aims at radically improving the working environment and employee security within the process and steel industries by using and adapting the latest technology for low- and ultra-precision positioning and decision support systems. The system is commercially used for underground mines, and Swerea MEFOS preindustrial pilot testbed is the perfect facility to install and adapt the equipment to harsh industrial conditions with many disruptive sources such as strong electromagnetic fields.

25The text is from the project application. Some spelling mistakes have been corrected in the text.

23 Chapter 2 The Projects

The results will be relevant for the base and manufacturing industries of Sweden. The target is to increase security by adapting a testbed supporting decision-support and positioning system for heavy manufacturing industries. It can detect people, machinery and equipment in real-time with high precision and prevent collisions and access to sensitive and dangerous areas through geo-fencing. The challenge is to create a robust test system which can cope with heavy industrial conditions with strong magnetic fields, high tempera- tures, particles and dust. The system should detect staff and equipment in real-time, secure non-access areas and being able to track solo workers, and announce emergencies, graphically on a desktop or the like.

Again, even though other industries were of concern, the mining industry provided much of the data. The positioning technology in these projects is the same (or similar) to that of SIMS; PosTech was an attempt to adapt the technology to a new setting. For this reason, much data was gathered from the mining industry, as it has had the most experience with the technology in question. Data collection activities included surveys of and interviews with operators. We also interviewed managers at different positions in a large mining company. In particular, we were tasked with investigating issues relating to the work environment and privacy/integrity, which, again, is similar to what we did within one of our tasks in SIMS.

On Some of the Common Themes of the Projects

The projects have some common themes. I try to summarise the common themes below, and I also attempt a brief analysis of some of the topics therein that relate to this thesis. With the exception of the two safety projects, the projects have had a clear technological focus.26 That is to say, the projects firstly aimed to develop new technology. While some of this technology aimed to improve safety (e.g., the technology in PosTech and in some of SIMS), the projects departed from technological “potential.” This means that the projects departed from technology and its capabilities as focus. For example, there is now technology that, with relative ease, can track employees. I suggest that it was only with this technology, as already developed, that companies started to explore its potential for improving safety. That is, the problem of lacking

26It is worth noting, however, that the technology-focused projects rhetorically are often viewed as safety projects. However, I do not view them as such here; as I expand on this later—essentially, safety in these cases appear more as a positive side-effect, rather than as being the prime motivation behind their development.

24 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ safety was not acknowledged first, and then, following that, different technologies investigated to find which could improve upon the situation. This is also clear where improvement to the work environment comes as positive side effect of the technology. There are, for example, other incentives than an improved work environment for developing battery-powered machines, mainly economic ones and, secondly, environmental (see Paper IV). Meaning, in these cases the technology happens to also improve the work environment, and this, in hindsight, then becomes an argument in favour of the technology. This sentiment is also present in the projects’ summaries, but is particularly apparent in consideration of a few facts, as well. Safety, or wider social issues, are not investigated in the tasks dealing specifically with technology. There is an apparent logic of “푥 is a cause of unsafe situations. Our technology 푦 protects against or miti- gates 푥. Therefore, safety is improved.” Telling of this logic is that our tasks or work packages (i.e., where Human Work Science and I, myself, were involved) came into the projects in the late stages of writing the applications for these projects. When the applications where, for the most part, completed, we would be contacted to cover the “soft” issues. In some cases, this would happen a few weeks before the submission deadline. This is an example of the “side-car” position of work environment issues mentioned in the introduction (i.e., Frick 1994; Hasle, Seim, and Refslund 2019).27 Beyond safety, I argue that the technology development has not attempted to address social issues, in these projects. And where our tasks have aimed to do so, in the majority of cases this has been through the investigation of health and safety. A final note regarding the cooperation with industry. All projects (including the safety projects) have had a close cooperation with companies in the mining industry, if they have not been outright led by them. The methods chapter goes into detail about this fact. Here, I just want to highlight that the projects have departed from problems that are either relevant to the industry or from problem-descriptions, as they were formulated by the industry. When the next chapter, in particular, goes further into issues of health and safety, it will be on this basis.

27However, to be fair, this situation is starting to change. In the follow-up project to SIMS, we have been involved from the start (though we had our work package removed, at one point). Other technology-driven mining projects have also come to seek the inclusion of “our” issues, on their own initiative.

Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

There are many ways to describe the mining industry, and this fact makes it difficult to give a general description (or at least, demarcate such a description) that would do the industry justice. Acknowledging this is not to avoid describing a complex industry; rather, it is an actual assertion about the character of the industry itself. While all industries have their own intricacies and complexities, the mining industry has certain, unique properties that set it apart from most other industry sectors. Individually, other industries likely possess similar characteristics, but I argue that nowhere else is the “configuration” of characteristics as extensive as it is in mining. Appreciating these constraints (the characteristics are interesting to the extent that they constrain the mining industry) forms an understanding of technological developments within the industry, in part. Many of the constraints within the mining industry appear in the production phase. To produce anything requires an organised activity (be that formally or informally so), such as: how many persons to employ; if in-house or contracted labour is preferable; working hours; if production should be parallel or serial; if production should be pulled or pushed through a system; and so on. The organisation of production must, at least in sociotechnical thought, respond to two types of demands: the technical and the social. Both components influence and are influenced by the organisation of production. Technical demands may be, for example, in the form of retaining high customisability for the customer. In the manufacturing industry, such customisability may require engineering-to-order, as well as a “functional layouts” (Bellgran and Säfsten 2010). Such technical requirements, in turn, affect social requirements (such as ability for teamwork, competence, and so on). In addition, depending on how well the overall system fulfils these requirements, new technical demands may, in turn, be imposed (e.g., a key competence might be missing and must then be contracted out). Many producing industries can respond to demands by changing aspects of their operation, such as in changing the layout of it (as was noted above). This approach, however, assumes that facilities and the like can be changed with relative ease. In many producing industries this is the case; even if there is a limit on the space available to a particular organisation, there are few constraints on what happens within that space. For mining companies (and other activities that have to adapt to natural conditions), such measures as altering operational layout are much more limited. With regards

27 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry to industrial engineering techniques, Maier, Kuhlmann, and Thiele (2014) also note that the cyclical nature of mining production—as opposed to more linear progression of traditional manufacturing—makes such techniques of adaptation more difficult to apply in mining operations. In mining operations, the ore body dictates many technical demands. First, the ore body may determine the viability of an open-cast mine over an underground one. Then, it may also determine if mass mining methods are possible, or if methods such as cut-and-fill can be used. The type of ore or mineral also has a lot of influence on technical demands. Salts, for instance, can be mined using solvent mining. Softer ores, or ores found in softer rock, make it possible to forego drill-and-blast and to instead shear or cut the rock. As aspects such as mining methods have to be adapted to the orebody characteristics and other local conditions (e.g., available technology), each mine has its own variation of some established method and is, in this sense, unique. An illustrative example is the mining handbook Techniques in Underground Mining (edited by Gertsch and Bullock 1998) (note that this is for underground mining); it lists 5 broader categories of techniques of mining, and then 13 more specific methods, but in total the handbook presents almost 40 examples of different applications of those mining methods. One chapter in Techniques in Underground Mining handles choosing an appropriate method:

Some readers may miss the inclusion of more detailed figures in the text. However, variations in ore deposits are so great and the state of mining technology so dynamic that being too specific could mislead the reader. Every orebody is unique. The successful application of a mining methods requires more than textbook knowledge; it also requires practical reasoning with a creative mind that is open to new impressions. (Hamrin 1998, 85)

Add to these factors the fact that a single mine might use several different mining methods, or that the same mine might mine different minerals, and it becomes clear that no two mines are alike.28 Which is to say, general technological solutions are rarer in mining than they are in other industries, because in mining many challenges must be overcome on a case-by-case basis. Matters on a macro-level scale are also different in mining than in other industries. Most producing industries are somewhere in the middle or end of the value creation chain. This means that other industries can mostly define their own limits of their operations. For example, a car producer may choose to focus only on assembly (e.g.,

28One might interject that this is similar to the construction industry. Indeed, the mining and construction industries are often compared to each other, with many activities of a mine involving construction activities. Yet,other factors, such as how long operations last, make the two industries vastly different.

28 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Toyota) or seek to integrate a large part of the value chain (e.g., being responsible for producing steel or tires, as Ford did) (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull 2019). Most industries can also respond to local demands quite radically, the clearest example being when companies move overseas to avoid certain laws or high labour costs. Mines, on the other hand, are at the start of the value chain.29 Mining companies can integrate down the value stream—for example, they can decide if they want to include a concentrator plant in their operations or just sell ore—but they cannot integrate upstream. The effect of this dynamic is that the mining industry cannot chose its primary supplier; the primary supplier is the ore body itself, as Steinberg and De Tomi (2010) posit.30 Finally, a mine cannot move overseas to escape local and national conditions. In fact, a mine cannot move at all. While capital can move—and it is not rare that a mine is shut down if it is unprofitable—ore deposits are finite and immobile.31 This means mining companies must solve challenges locally. The type of challenge that arises will often, then, be of the social kind, as the issue of workplace attractiveness exemplifies. An additional aspect to all this is that of the immense capital costs involved in mining. Developing a mine can require millions of Euros and up to a decade of time. This, too, makes it unlikely that a mine will move once it has been established (it may still go bankrupt, however). It also means that decisions regarding technology in mining carry with them much inertia; once a mining company has made and implemented a decision regarding technology, the system in place will be hard to change and will be around for a long time.32 For reasons such as these, the introduction to this thesis held that solutions and experiences from other industries may not apply to the mining industry. The restrictions described above influence technology, in such as there is specific mining technology: consider, for example, that a truck can be designed for the manufacturing industry as a whole. That truck probably could see only limited use in a mine (e.g., in a warehouse). Likewise, a mine truck can almost

29This thesis includes original equipment manufacturers in its definition of the mining industry. Of course, the equipment manufacturers are not mining companies and exist at other places within the value chain. In fact, most original equipment manufacturers exist as traditional manufacturing companies. It worth noting, also, that being at the start of the value chain is a characteristic shared by mining with other industries that extract or produce raw resources, such as oil extraction and forestry. In Paper I, I note that the oil industry exhibits similar behaviour to that of the mining industry, with regards to lean production. 30Mining companies can choose auxiliary suppliers in the form of, for example, contractors, but this is a different situation. 31At least in Sweden—but, I assume elsewhere, as well—mining companies and their organisations note the long and difficult process of acquiring a license to operate. If it were a simple decision to try their luck somewhere else, I suspect this discussion would be quieter. 32Paper V explores in detail this situation, with a focus on health, safety, and social challenges. See also Lööw et al. (2018).

29 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry only be used in mining. Therefore, the mining industry requires special attention. This current chapter, thus, explores some of the effects of the mining industry’s unique situation, so as to give a foundation—a background and context—to the rest of the thesis. These effects presented here have additional effects in many areas; they have been reviewed extensively regarding areas such as economy and productivity in other research (e.g., Garcia, Knights, and Tilton 2001; Tilton 2014). Effects on the workplace, however, remain less explored.33 The research that does exist in the area of workplace effects in the mining industry tends to focus on health and safety in a traditional sense. And, while this chapter departs from that research, the chapter also puts into focus how the effects on health and safety translate into other areas. This chapter, thus, aims to highlight the limits of current approaches to issues such as health and safety in the mining industry. The exploration of this chapter has three parts. First, it gives a brief account of two mining methods. While the introduction to this chapter notes that no two mining methods are alike, some insight into how ore is mined is required, so as to exemplify how the character of mining operations constrain many other activities. Second, this chapter details the development of a Swedish mining company over time. Here again, only to a limited extent can a single mining company represent the industry, in general; however, seeing the context of certain developments and their subsequent effects is illustrative. Third, this chapter explores, in detail, the health and safety of the industry and its complex relationships with other issues.

Exemplifying Two Mining Methods

Work, technology, and techniques involved in mining are asymmetrical with respect to different sections of a mine, mining companies, and countries (Goodman and Gar- ber 1988; Abrahamsson and Johansson 2006). Mining operations span from those of heavy manual work with rudimentary tools to those of highly-automated operations. Still, most tasks in mining fall under either development work or production. The specifics of each task under these categories will vary, depending on factors such as the mining method, the type of mine (open-cast or underground), and so on. The focus in this chapter will be on underground mines (no open-cast mines are investigated in this thesis). Preparatory, or development, work in mining aims to gain access to the ore, to make the deposit ready for excavation.34 In underground mining, this work means constructing drifts and tunnels (TNC 2016), specifically, which involves drilling,

33It may serve as an illustrative example to consider that there are established research subjects such as mineral economics, but no such subject regarding mining health and safety. 34Of course, preparatory work still excavates rock. The difference is that production tasks excavate ore.

30 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ charging, blasting, ventilating, scaling, loading, and rock reinforcement (e.g., by shotcreting and rockbolting, depending on the conditions of the rock) (Atlas Copco 2007). Excavation, or production, work then removes the ore from the mountain. Both categories of tasks happen as part of the drill-and-blast cycle, which consists of drilling, blasting, loading, and transporting (Hartman and Mutmansky 2002). Often, this stage also involves ventilating, scaling, and rock reinforcement. One such cycle results in a certain amount of ore being excavated or that a section of tunnel is completed. For production, the cycle repeats until the ore body (or a specific section of it) is depleted. For development work, it repeats until the tunnel has reached its destination. The exact details of these cycles and which tasks they involve depend on the mining method and conditions of the mine, ore and mountain. (Note that the basics of the drill-and-blast cycle also apply to open-cast mining). Preparation and excavation are also possible through mechanical methods. Here, a machine—a roadheader, for example—shears or cuts the rock. As rock or ore is sheared, it must be transported away from the machine. Following this, the tunnels constructed by this process are usually inspected and reinforced. Scaling, in this case, is not necessary, as the process itself produces much smoother surfaces than those produced by a drill-and-blast procedure; there is no loose rock to remove from walls or ceilings. Mechanical excavation, at least in metal mining, is rare. For ore extraction, mostly salts and coal can be mined in this way.35 For metal mining, it is possible to use mechanical excavation in combination with drilling and blasting; in these cases, roadheaders are used in preparatory work (i.e., to construct drifts), while the drill- and-blast technique is used to excavate ore. It is worth noting that there are ongoing efforts to develop roadheaders (or, rather, the cutting heads that these machines use) that can cut harder rock and even metal ores.36 These developments represent something of a holy grail in some circles. Con-

35In underground coal mining, the longwall method is common practice. Its mechanised variant consists of a large cutting head that runs the length of the coal seam shearing the coal, the results of which are then transported away using conveyors. The setup usually has a mechanised roof support that roughly consists of plates that are pushed up against the roof to support it; as the supports and cutting head are moved forward, the roof collapses behind it. One of the conclusions of the studies of Bamforth and Trist (1951), concerning the longwall method, is that this process involves a more linear production and “manufacturing-like” organisation. There are also manual variants of the longwall method; in these cases, the coal is mined using manual tools, while support is still constructed along the face of the seam. This method gets its name, longwall, from the fact that wide seams are mined. In open-cast coalmining, huge excavators are used. Probably the most distinct machine in this is the bucket-wheel excavator. If one imagines what strip mining looks like, this machine is likely to have a central place in that image. Coal and salts are much softer materials than rock and metal ores. It is for this reason that mechanical excavation is possible for coal and salt mining but not metal mining. 36One work package in I2Mine developed such a cutting head. One of the field visits listed in Chapter 2 was to evaluate potential effects of the cutting head on the work environment.

31 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry tinuous mining—which is what mechanical excavation, in extension, allows for— means a much more predictable mining process. In turn, this kind of process would, in theory, allow for extensive automation. As it may be hard to visualise how these activities are carried out, especially since they differ depending on their area of application, the next part of this section exemplifies two common mining methods.37 The methods selected for this purpose— sublevel caving and cut-and-fill—are relatively common. Most mining companies involved in this study use these methods or variants of them. Sublevel caving is used for large, steep orebodies. Having gained access to the orebody, levels of drifts are excavated from the body so that it has several sublevels, each with a number of parallel drifts. In each drift, vertical drill holes are drilled upwards and towards the level above. These holes are then charged with explosives. Starting at the highest level, and at the backmost point of the drift, the explosives are detonated so that the ore caves into the drift. The ore is then loaded and transported through one mean or another to an ore chute. How each sublevel is excavated—that is, which drifts and sections of the drifts are excavated—depends on factors such as production quotas and rock stability. At a certain point of extraction, the sublevel below starts being excavated. The developments of the drifts follow a typical drill-and-blast cycle. However, during the production itself the cycle lacks many steps, as certain steps where performed during the development stage (e.g., drilling and charging the vertical drill holes). Because of this setup, extracting the ore from the sublevels can proceed continuously in this method. In addition to sublevels, most sublevel caving operations also feature main levels. These function to transport the ore from the mine to above ground (thus, they are also called haulage levels). The ore that is dumped into ore chutes arrives at this level. Sublevel caving requires substantial investment in infrastructure: drifts and ramps to reach ore body, for example, as well as the main levels themselves. The development of a main level alone can cost several million Euros to complete. To summarise:

[Sublevel caving] is schematic, and repetitive, both in layout and working procedures. Development drifting, production drilling of long holes, charging, blasting and mucking out are all carried out separately, with work taking place at different levels simultaneously. There is always a place for the machines to work, which integrates mech- anization into efficient ore production. Consequently, the … method is well suited for a high degree of automation and remote operations, with corresponding high productivity. (Atlas Copco 2007, 37)

37The account is based mainly on Atlas Copco (2007) and Atlas Copco (2014), but it is also from my own knowledge that I have built up during interviews with mining engineers, by reading mining engineering handbooks, etc.

32 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Cut-and-fill mining is usually applied to steep, often irregular orebodies. This method is selective in that there is much control over which deposit gets mined or not (i.e., lower grade ores can be skipped); where sublevel caving is large-scale, cut- and-fill mining is a small-scale method of mining. Cut-and-fill operations excavate ore in horizontal segments, starting at the bottom of an orebody where a segment is mined in a drill-and-blast cycle. The space created is then backfilled with tailings, for example, or waste rock or paste. This fill then becomes the floor of the next segment to be mined. Ramps are usually developed to reach the orebody, and infrastructure, such as ventilation, must be installed in the stopes. In cut-and-fill operations, there may be ore chutes to which the ore is transported. Or, ore may be loaded onto trucks and transported to the surface that way. Cut-and-fill mining is comparatively simple and effective, but it requires more time and has higher costs for rock support, drilling, and blasting. On the other hand, much of the equipment used for development work in this method can also be used in production. Which mining method is applied is one part of how a mining company functions. Organisation and technology are other important factors that also influence, and are influenced by, the mining method selected. The next section will expand upon these factors, by describing how organisation and technology developed within a Swedish mining company that uses sublevel caving. This example provides a picture of how these separate elements connect and relate.

Developments in a Mining Company Over Time

The following account is of a Swedish mining company (Mining Company A).38 In a global perspective, contemporary Swedish mining may be unique: mechanisation, automation, worker rights, workplace culture, and so on, of the same kind might not be found outside of Sweden. The implications of this fact should not be overlooked; the Swedish case represents a unique, or even extreme, case. At the same time, historically, Swedish mining has borne similarities to other mining operations in the world (contemporary in general and, arguably, even now). The point is that this account can show how a mining organisation can develop. The developments presented below are, in and of themselves, not necessarily unique to a Swedish context nor to a particular company. I argue that the individual developments presented here have taken place at other companies, but that the configuration of these developments, also presented here, is unique. As such, the account should serve to show, on the one hand, how a mining company responds to some challenges and, on the other hand, the manner in which a mining operation may progress towards an advanced (some would say “modern”) form of mining. Finally, from a practical perspective, accounts

38This is based on a text that I originally wrote for Lööw et al. (2018).

33 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry of such developments of a mining company, as presented below, are rare—to my knowledge, there is no other material available of such accounts than the one I draw upon for this description. The description of the company in review arises primarily from Johansson (1986). He describes, in detail, the work and technology of a Swedish underground iron ore mine between 1957 and 1984. He notes that, in 1957, work in the mine utilised many machines, but he also notes that, at the same time, the need for heavy manual labour was still significant. Additionally, at this time, the degree of mechanisation and technological sophistication was asymmetric throughout the mine; production activities used modern, sometimes semi-automated machines, while development work still utilised older types of machinery involving manual operations. Semi-automation consisted of partial automation of drill rigs, for example, where the operator had to feed drill steels to the drill. Work was organised into teams, which were in turn responsible for entire production cycles and planning. The company considered itself to have made use of technological developments to both improve working conditions and increase productivity. Due to the demands for labour during at this time, they also implemented progressive staffing policies. The director of the company was illustrated as saying:

In question of salaries, pensions and working hours, our company’s miners should be better off than any other comparable group of industrial workers in Sweden … The development that has led to the rapid improvement of working conditions with regards to spaces, ventilation, il- lumination, and so on, and to a lighter and less dangerous work, is important. And in the long run, those factors that relate to … that which can be summarised within terms of satisfaction and well-being at work may be even more important. (Johansson 1986, 125, my translation.)

In 1962, Johansson (1986) reports, salaries in the production activities were high, but salaries for developmental work were lower.39 The technological asymmetries were still present, but they were less pronounced. For example, in 1962, both developmental work and production activities used the same kind of loading and hauling machinery; this reduced the need for manual labour. Charging had been mechanised in the production cycle. Moreover, where electrically driven trucks had previously been used, those trucks were now replaced by more efficient, diesel-driven trucks. The introduction of diesel, however, brought with it several work environment issues related to increased noise levels, vibrations, and exhaust fumes. Production groups

39I have not been able to determine why and by how much the salaries differed. Production activities at this time used productions groups—as detailed below—and with that a different system for salaries. This might be the reason for the differences in salaries, especially if the production groups were more productive.

34 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ were broad and included chargers, loaders, drivers, and repair personnel; these groups consisted of 17 to 28 workers, 4 of which were trained to do repairs. None of the group members were tied to specific tasks; instead, they rotated. Johansson (1986) further describes that, by 1969, the introduction of remote control by the company had begun (although not from control rooms). Mechanisation had continuously increased, which entailed investment into expensive machines. To ensure the return on the investment, machines needed to reach full utilisation in certain areas; operators experienced this development as increasing psychological pressures. In other areas of the mine, the levels of automation and mechanisation remained the same. Technological development also introduced more modern equipment which, in turn, meant increased technical capacities (for example, bigger loads for LHDs—load-haul-dump machines). Isolated work was more common; in some cases, workers would only meet at shift changes. Planning had moved away from being in the hand of the workers and into a specialised planning department. The account of Johansson (1986) for 1974 illustrates that, while many operations remained unchanged, machines had continuously increased in size, capacity, and power. The workers had had input in requisitioning this equipment. Technological development meant new machines that improved the work environment, and improved ventilation was responsible for many of the work environment enhancements. No- tably, by this time all machines were diesel-powered. And, while production groups still existed at the time, they had been altered; for example, due to changes in the wage system that involved the removal of piece-rates, following a strike,40 the requirement for cooperation was less pronounced. The foremen also experienced a change in responsibility, as well as a loss of both freedom and resources. The CEO during that time claimed that the self-controlling production groups required direct input from foremen. The succeeding CEO held that the non-piece-rate wages were problematic for productivity, because such wages made performance increases more difficult to achieve. The responsibility of planning was moved entirely to the production department; these changes aimed to maximise machine utilisation and ensure certain characteristics of the ore. The continued account by Johansson (1986) details a company that, by 1978, is in deep crisis due to the steel crisis.41 This shift in circumstances meant that matters of personnel were focused on keeping the company alive; it also meant a stunted development in general. Yet, the CEO at that time spoke positively of autonomous groups and decentralised decision-making. Work tasks, however, had remained mostly unchanged.

40For in-depth descriptions and analyses, see Dahlström et al. (1971); Kronlund et al. (1973). 41The steel crisis was a steel market recession during the 1970s and early 1980s. It occurred in two stages—first during the mid 1970s, and then again in the early 1980s. This followed the 1973 oil crisis, and it was further exacerbated by the 1979 oil crisis.

35 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

In 1985, the trend had turned once again, and the company produced good results. The illustration of the mine at that time, by Johansson (1986), is of a work system that had remained much the same since 1978. There had, however, been several work environment improvements, in addition to capacity advances. Electrically-powered machines were re-introduced, and all employees were trained in quality assurance. From 1985 to 2005 there is a gap in available material on the company, but Abra- hamsson and Johansson (2006) continue the account of the company from then on. The principal changes that occurred up to this period were increased automation and remote control. This meant moving the control of certain operations into control rooms, where teams of operators oversaw the processes but each operator had a specific task (i.e., an operator was a driller, a loader, and so on). Due to the fact that operations were performed from specific control rooms, there were also spatial divisions created between the operators. Technology utilised by the company up to 2006, in other words, saw a continuous development. However, the development was asymmetrical—even today, some tasks remain manual while others are highly-automated. In general, the earlier stages of the production process are harder to mechanise and automate. As ore becomes more refined, and the processes becomes further removed from the “mountain,” it becomes easier to automate (Johansson 1986; Abrahamsson and Johansson 2006). Tbl. 3.1 summarises the entire technological development.

Table 3.1: Technological level over the years at Mining Company A.42

Process type Work task 1957 1969 1985 2005

Material extraction Drilling 2/3 3/3 3/3 3/6 Charging 1/1 2/2 2/2 2/2 Blasting 1/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 Transport Loading 3/3 3/3 3/3 3/3 Hauling/dumping 3 / 3 3 / 3 3 / 3 5 Chute loading 4 4 5 5 Dumping 3 4 6 6 Processing Crushing 4 6 6 6 Hoisting Skip loading 4 6 6 6 Skip hoisting 6 6 6 6

42This table is based on Abrahamsson and Johansson (2006). They use the following figures denote technological level: 1—manual work; 2—motor manual work; 3—machine work; 4—operating work; 5—remote control; 6—automated work. Note that in the 푥 / 푦 notation, 푥 refers to the development unit operations, and 푦 refers to production unit operations.

36 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

All of these technological and organisational developments have had clear effects on factors such as productivity, employment, education, and workforce structure. The effects on productivity and employment are particularly illustrative. The development of the reviewed company’s labour productivity43 between 1950 and 2015 is illustrated in fig. 3.1. This development has a few dips, but, on the whole, it has increased continuously. The years 1975–1983, during which the steel crisis took place (see, e.g., Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. 2002), represent the biggest exception to the upward production trend. Fig. 3.2 shows the changes in employees and production at reviewed company during the same period, using figures for 1950 as index. This presentation gives a different picture; here it is possible to identify four distinct phases (references to specific measures in the text below are from Johansson 1986).44 The first phase, regarding labour and production in the company, is between 1950 and around 1960. Here, the number of employees increased at about the same rate as production volume, and this resulted in a relatively constant productivity for the period. Most mining at the company at this time is conducted in open-cast mines; production increases are due to increased employees.45 At a later point, just before starting underground mining, the company argued that they had too many employees. The years 1960–1974 make up the second phase. Two features characterise this phase: the transition to underground mining and a large increase in production volume. Productivity almost doubled during this period. A large process of rationalisa- tion is conducted at the time, but the company argued that this productivity increase, for the most part, involved optimising planning; underground mining introduces limits, or boundary conditions, that do not exist in open-cast mining. Thus, productivity increases are more readily reached through the application of mathematics. In this time period (1957–1969), ore prices dropped around 40 per cent. This was overcome with the help of production volume increases (i.e., economies of scales). Note that underground mining, more so than open-cast mining, requires a base set-up of

43Labour productivity is measured as production volume per employee. The numbers below are based on Johansson (1986) and yearly reports of the reviewed company, but the calculations here differ from the measures used in these sources. Johansson (1986) measured productivity as production volume per worker (i.e., not all employees). This measure is unavailable today, because the mining company does not report on its number of workers. The figures below are calculated using production volume per employee in the mother company, while the company, itself, uses employees in the concern group. Johansson (1986) also used numbers concerning the mother company. The number of employees in the concern group have not been reported long enough to allow comparison with historic figures. 44These descriptions are my own attempts to explain the developments. 45As noted, the company has argued that its increase in production volume was due to increased mechanisation (Johansson 1986). The development presented and explained here does not con- tradict this. Usually, single tasks are mechanised (and not the entire value-creating chain). This means that the increased productivity due to mechanisation needs to be met with more employees at other sections.

37 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

Figure 3.1: Mining Company A’s labour productivity between 1950 and 2015.

Figure 3.2: Changes in employees and production in Mining Company A between 1950 and 2015.

38 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ employees that are more or less independent of the production volume; this meant that there was a relatively constant workforce during this period. The years 1976–1983, the third phase, were dominated by the steel crisis. A large part of the employees were let go, while production declined (with a two-year exception).46 In other words, the crisis was not weathered by increased productivity. The tide turned again in 1984. Productivity at this time increased more or less constantly. A first potential explanation for this is that the company utilised a similar mining method to that of the second phase, but then as the technological development continued to increase, productivity gains were greater. Alternatively, the development during this period can be seen to reflect the increased use of contractors. While contractors have been used since at least the 1960s (Kronlund et al. 1973), a more systematic utilisation of this type of labour seems to have begun during the 1980s (Blank et al. 1995). More recent figures estimate that around 12 per cent of all hours worked in the Swedish mining industry are by contractors (SGU 2016); this figure is even put close to 40 per cent, in some cases (Nygren 2018). Because contractors are not reported as employees of the mining company, labour productivity will appear to increase. Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. (2002, 1233) provide a third explanation to similar developments in the industry, in general:47 New technology … contributed little to the gains [during the 1980s]. The technology in this mature industry changes very slowly. There have been gradual improvements in technology, of course, and these gradual improvements have led to much better iron-ore products and higher productivity. Examples of such improvements include the gradual increase in the size of equipment and the gradual integration of computers into the production process. But no dramatic change in technology occurred in the middle 1980’s that caused the productivity surges observed [during this period]. Blank et al. (1998) provide a similar account, but with an alternative explanation for the same company and its development, relating to work hours and production. They

46Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. (2002) argued that in 1974 the industry did not believe the crisis would last as long as it did; they showed that steel production recovered in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, the prices of steel fell again. Most likely it is this trend that the figures above illustrate. 47In a footnote to the paragraph that the quote is from, Galdón-Sánchez and Schmitz Jr. (2002, 1233) note: There is a caveat. In contrast to the mines in the other top-producing countries, the Swedish mines were underground. Underground mining methods of all types … and, in particular, of Swedish iron ore have changed significantly. Somewhat frustratingly, they do not go further into what changes these might have been. But looking at the other accounts presented here, clearly it is not a question of significantly different technology.

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listed the following major changes (listed in the remainder of this paragraph). Between 1953 and 1958, exploitation began underground, and with this progress followed the introduction of new processes and technologies, as well as a bonus/piece-rate system; additionally, the company recruited more personnel. Work intensification and ratio- nalisation (in the form of time studies), as well as mechanisation took place between 1959 and 1968, and there were redundancies. In the period of 1969 and 1974, piece- rates were removed (due to the strike), signs of internal crisis started to appear, and the competition on the iron-ore market intensified. The crisis culminated between 1975 and 1983, and this all resulted in more layoffs. The crisis waned during the period of 1984 and 1989, and there was new profitability; new mining systems, including automation, were introduced, and subcontracting practices started. Between 1990 and 1993, technological development advanced and further subcontracting took place. These developments have also had clear effects on the structure and education of the workforce. Figures compiled by Johansson (1986) show that in the early 1950s about ten per cent of all employees of reviewed company were white-collar workers. Around ten years later, this figure was 15 per cent. In the early 1960s, this figure increased to 20 per cent. Then, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, 22 per cent of the workforce consisted of white-collar workers. Statistics of this nature do not seem to exist after 1984, but educational levels of the Swedish mining industry are available (see tbl. 3.2) and can be used to construct a similar picture. These numbers capture a general increase in national educational levels, but even so, the lowest levels of education have decreased considerably within the mining industry. An increasing number of jobs now require at least some upper secondary education, and the majority require a full three-year education. On the tertiary level, education levels of a bachelor’s degree or higher have increased almost fourfold. That is, the trend is one of increasing educational levels of the workforce within the mining industry.

Table 3.2: Change (in percentage) in educational levels in the Swedish mining industry, between 1995 and 2014.48

Education Level 1995 2014 Change49

Primary school 34.7 11.5 -23.2 Upper secondary school, up to 2 years 42.6 31.7 -10.9 Upper secondary school, 3 years 13.2 35.0 +21.8 Tertiary education, less than 3 years 5.8 8.9 +3.0 Tertiary education, 3 years or more including doctoral 3.6 12.7 +9.1 studies No data 0.2 0.3 -

40 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Lööw et al. (2018) also present figures on the structure of the workforce. Although the second most common job in the industry is that of operators driving machinery, it also appears as a rather uncommon profession in the mines. In the mines, technology and natural science specialists make up a considerable part of the workforce. In general, low-skilled labour is rare in the mines. Also, these figures do not include contractors. As noted, contractors have come to represent a significant amount of hours worked within the industry. They are rarely included in statistics, however, even if they have recently started to receive more attention (starting with SGU 2016, SGU now includes contractors in their mining industry statistics). Another development has been the contraction of the industry in terms of number of employees and places of work. In the 1950s, there were more than 100 places of work and 12,000–15,000 employees in the industry. In the 2010s, there were less than 20 places of work and 8,000 employees (SGU 2016). This means that while there are fewer mines, the mines have grown in size.50 And at the same time, the mines are more productive than ever, with regards to tonnes produced per man hour, even if the production volumes are lower than before the steel crisis. These developments suggest that the mining industry has gone in the direction of more advanced operations that require high-skilled labour, coupled with an increase in the size of individual companies. This increase in size, when coupled with the use of contractors (Nygren 2018), creates more complex organisations. Thus, concurrently, the mining industry requires less labour than before, but the labour that it does require is more difficult to recruit. The purpose of this account has been, primarily, to illustrate the close connec-

48Data for this table comes from Statistics Sweden. Note also that the classification systems of both the education level and industry changed between 1995 and 2014, but they still provide a clear indication of the changes that occurred. 49The change in percentage points; a minus signifies a decrease and a plus an increase. 50For these and other figures in this section I have tried to find comparable international data. This has been difficult with the exception of production data. However, since employment figures are not available, it is not worthwhile to compare the production data to the figures I present here. The US and Australia are exceptions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) publish historical statistics regarding number of active mines (https://wwwn.cdc.gov/NIOSH- Mining/MMWC/Mine) and mine operators and independet contractor employees (https:// wwwn.cdc.gov/NIOSH-Mining/MMWC/Employee/Count). The CDC figures show a development that is different from that in Sweden. Between 1983 and 2018, the number of mines in the US decrease by about 23 per cent (from 16,880 to 13,046). Employment in the US mining industry during the same period decreased by 20 per cent (from 414,860 to 331,923). So while the industry has decreased in size, in terms of number of mines and employees, this does not seem to have lead to fewer and larger mines. (It might also be interesting to note that the use of contractors in the US mining industry seems to have increased starting in the late 1980s, early 1990s.) In Australia, employment in metal mining more than doubled between 1984 and 2011 (unfortunately, Wikipedia is the only source for these figures that I have been able to find; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Australia).

41 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry tions between various developments within the mining industry and their effects on the workplace and workforce. It is difficult to singularly explain the developments, but, regardless, it is clear that there is a connection between them; I believe that this background is necessary for the next part of this chapter, in which I examine workplace effects, specifically. The material on which this account has been based often does not connect to larger developments within the mining industry. Yet, the connections exhibited are important in understanding how certain effects have come to be. Particularly in the later parts of this thesis, I will argue for the importance of wider industrial and societal trends in the addressing of workplaces of the mining industry.51 The reason for turning to issues of health and safety in the industry next in this chapter52 is that these areas are still, in my view, why workplace interventions within the industry are undertaken. By exploring how these issues are treated, I exhibit some aspects of the complexities of changing and developing workplaces in the mining industry.

Health in the Mining Industry

Health issues in the mining industry rank among the most recognisable of issues, and they also occupy a significant amount of company resources. The mining industry is overrepresented in work-related health problems. For example, the European Com- mission (2010) found that, in 2007, the mining industry was the economic sector with the most work-related health problems in the EU. That same study also showed that work-related health problems in mining had increased (health problems had increased in all sectors, but more so in mining than in most other sectors). The most common health problems in mining are respiratory diseases, noise-induced hearing loss, and musculoskeletal disorders (Elgstrand and Vingård 2013). Dust is largely responsible for respiratory diseases within the industry. Among the common diseases caused by dust are coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, silicosis, asbestosis, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis (Elgstrand and Vingård 2013; Donoghue 2004). The dusts responsible contain silica, coal, radon, and diesel particles, which gives rise to these diseases. Many of these particles also increase the risk of lung cancer. Dust is additionally problematic in mining due to its limiting of visibility, which can, in turn, increase the likelihood of accidents, decrease work performance, and so on. Noise is common in mining, because most of the activities involved—drilling, blast-

51If this is not apparent for any other reason, the problem of lacking attractiveness in the mining industry is one relating to changing demographics (e.g., educational levels and where the people with the required education live) and the mining industry’s need for a different demographic brought on by factors such as changing technology levels and manners of organising. 52The text for the next two sections are based on texts that I originally wrote for Lööw et al. (2018). I have, however, significantly revised these texts for these sections.

42 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

ing, handling materials, ventilation, crushing, conveying, ore processing—all produce noise. Exposure to noise has both short- and long-term effects: permanent and tem- porary hearing reduction and loss, feelings of discomfort, disturbed sleep, reduced performance, stress, increased blood pressure, increased muscle tension, the release of stress hormones, and the masking of conversations and warning signals (Bohgard et al. 2009). The masking effect reduces the possibility for information exchange and increases the risk of accidents. Many ergonomic risks also are associated with mining. At the same time, due to changes in mining work practices, physical ergonomics in the industry are now different from what they have traditionally been. McPhee (2004, 298) argues that “Physically heavy work is now likely to be intermittent and limited”; while workers still manually install infrastructure, do maintenance, etc., “many of these jobs are partially or fully mechanized and much more time is spent operating machinery and driving vehicles.” Some of the most prominent ergonomic risks in mining are vibrations and manual tasks (Donoghue 2004; McPhee 2004), the consequences of which make up a significant part of work-related health problems in mining (Swedish Work Environment Authority 2017; Elgstrand and Vingård 2013). The increased mechanisation in mining has meant a reduced need for physical work. In turn, manual tasks and hand-arm vibrations (hand-arm vibrations come almost exclusively from powered hand-tools) are now uncommon; today, manual tasks and hand-arm vibrations are mostly present in maintenance and activities related to infrastructure. Whole- body vibrations (WBV), on the other hand, are still a problem in mining. Almost all machinery used in mining (i.e., machines in which the operator operates the machine from the machine itself) is a source of WBV. Many neck and back injuries can be traced back to WBV. All of these problems are consequences of physical, chemical, and ergonomic hazards. Physical and chemical hazards stem mostly from the mining environment. Er- gonomic hazards depend more on the design of machines, for instance, or work tasks. Historically, important changes have occurred in frequency and relative occurrence of work-related diseases in mining. Tbl. 3.3 compares the differences between the most prominent factors of work-related diseases in Swedish mining between the 1980s and 2010s. The table shows that there has been a change in the dominant causes of occupational diseases within the industry over the years, from chemical and physical (noise and vibration) factors in the 1980s, to ergonomic factors in the 2010s. This change is consistent with developments in the industry—exposure to noise and chemical factors decreased as mining became more mechanised and automated, due to the fact that work began to be performed from (isolated) cabins. Yet, during this same period, ergonomic issues increased; the fact that many mining machines still lack in several ergonomic respects (Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011) may be explain this development. On the other hand, tbl. 3.3 also presents the aggregated

43 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry frequency of the causes of health issues in mining during the two periods. These figures show that most relative frequencies have decreased; ergonomic factors are only proportionally more prominent. Factors relating to organisational and social factors have marginally increased.53

Table 3.3: The aggregated number, frequency, and distribution of causes of work-related diseases in mining in Sweden.54

Ergonomic Chemical/biological Organisational/social factors55 factors56 Noise57 factors Other58 Sum

1980– 1984 Count 236 200 307 3 28 774 Frequency 3.8 3.3 5.0 - 0.5 12.6 Proportion 30% 26% 40% - 4% 2010– 2014 Count 82 14 54 4 13 167 Frequency 2.0 0.3 1.3 0.1 0.3 4.1 Proportion 49% 8% 32% 2% 8%

The control of these hazards is central to understanding the approach to workplace issues within the mining industry. First, these controls represent technology that in-

53The first period reports almost no work-related diseases resulting from organisational factors. This does not mean that they largely did not exist as an issue during this period. Rather, these issues have become more prominent—recognised as occurring—during the 2010s. In particular, the 2010s saw the arrival of AFS 2015:1 provisions (on organisational and social work environment), which resulted in these factors being viewed as important (Lööw and Nygren 2019). One could also argue that social and organisational factors get hidden or suppressed by other issues. For example, stress or bad leadership might not appear as relevant factors when faced with more pressing, immediate risks (rock falls, etc.). These factors have probably always existed as a (partial) cause, however they may have surfaced only as other issues have been addressed. 54Data for this table comes from Sweden’s National Board of Occupational Safety and Health and Statistics Sweden (the period 1980–1984), as well as the Swedish Work Environment Author- ity (the period 2010–2014). Sweden’s National Board of Occupational Safety and Health did not calculate frequency rates the same way that the Swedish Work Environment Authority does. Therefore, rates for the first period have been calculated using figures from Statistics Sweden. 55The official translation is “ergonomic factors” but is close to physical ergonomics. 56Earlier publications separated these categories (but no biological factors were reported for the first period). 57Earlier publication separated these categories into “noise” and “vibration” while later publications merged them. 58Earlier publications listed “other physical factors,” but they have been merged into this category.

44 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ dustry uses. Second, while technical demands largely dominate the reasoning regarding decisions on technology within the industry, health and safety are non-technical issues that do receive attention. Ventilation reduces the amount of dust (i.e., one of the chemical hazards) that personnel are exposed to. In application, ventilation can either dilute the dusty air by providing clean air, or it can use an airflow to “trap” the dust at the source and keep it away from personnel (Kissell 2003). There also exists water spraying for dust control, a technique that both prevents dust from getting into the air after it is generated and captures dust that is already airborne (Kissell 2003). Dust collectors, which function like vacuums cleaners, can also be used (in cabins, for example, or at the cutting heads of roadheader). The less dust that is generated in the first place, the better. Strategies to accomplish the lessening of dust in mining include: using deeper cuts in long-wall operations; using water-injection drilling; and preventing personnel from entering the production area after blasting, so as to let the dust first settle or be removed by ventilation (Kissell 2003). Dust can also be generated by moving equipment; trucks moving loads on poor roads, and the roads themselves, produce dust (Kissell 2003). Some dust can be removed through substitution of technology; an example of this is in the use of electrically powered, instead of diesel-powered, mining machines, which, in turn, reduces exposure to diesel fumes. Low-emissions diesel fuels, and also engines with a high European emission standard (e.g., Euro VI), also reduce diesel fumes. Finally, automation and remote control are effective solutions for lessening operator exposure to dust. Moving just a short distance away from dust sources can lessen exposure (Kissell 2003). Control rooms are much less dusty than production areas. Mechanisation in which the machine is operated from an isolated cabin also decreases exposure. However, dust can still be present through dusty or dirty clothing, for example, which means that measures such as good housekeeping practices and closed doors during operations are also important (Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011) for lessening dust exposure. Compared to air pollutants, noise cannot be removed or controlled through mine infrastructure. Thus, mining companies have less control over the issue of noise, and they must rely on the designs of mining machines and the like for managing the problem. Thus, coupled with the issue of the many sources of noise is the difficulty to control the noise sources. Eliminating noise completely is the most preferable option, but this is seldom possible due to the fact that the source of the noise would have to be removed—which is the very fragmentation of rock, etc., required in mining. This has made engineering controls a common solution. Barriers and sound-absorbing materials are commonly-used engineering controls for noise pollution. Isolated cabins combine barriers and sound-absorbing materials. This means that efforts to procure well-designed machines can have significant

45 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry effects on reducing problems of noise in the workplace. Retrofitting machines to this effect after their procurement is possible, and this is commonly done, but such a process is often more expensive and less effective (Reeves et al. 2009) than machines pre-fitted with these measures. It may also be difficult to retrofit, as the machines are not designed for this, and retrofitting can also compromise the machine’s other functionalities (including safety) (Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011). Noise can also be isolated or reduced so as to lessen exposure to its effects. For example, sound from an engine can be reduced by installing (better) mufflers, and noisy machines can be spatially or physically isolated. Remote control can reduce exposure to noise or even completely isolate personnel from it (Reeves et al. 2009). Hearing protection is commonly used in mining, but it is often misused or not used at all. Hearing protection also makes communication more difficult and may mask auditory warnings (McBride 2004). Administrative control involves reducing the exposure of personnel to noise; this can be achieved either through decreasing the amount of time that operators spend in noisy environments, or by controlling the source of noise. For example, set routines can disallow machines to operate when personnel are in the vicinity. The control of physical ergonomics depends largely on the design of the equipment being used, and this matter is, thus, somewhat outside of the direct control of mining companies. However, manual labour depends directly on the specific task assigned, and this is a situation that mining companies can influence. Increased mechanisation and automation reduces manual labour. Yet, maintenance, which is largely manual, increases where automation and mechanisation increase. Different tools, such as lift- ing aids, can improve ergonomics, but their use is not guaranteed. Removing manual tasks decreases hand-arm vibrations, but because removing manual tasks often means increased mechanisation, WBVs increase simultaneously. Sev- eral factors influence WBV, and there are a variety of subsequent controls for this issue: the type of vehicle used, its speed, maintenance, and the condition of roads are all important factors. Several ways of reducing WBV relate to these elements, also: ensuring careful operation of machinery, setting speed limits, ensuring roads are of good quality, well-maintained and -designed vehicles, and introducing varied work tasks and work breaks (McPhee 2004).

Safety in the Mining Industry

Safety, perhaps even more so than health, remains a significant issue in mining. Even if, by some accounts, developments in safety have been more positive than those for health (European Commission 2010), this picture will vary depending on where one looks. Lilley, Samaranayaka, and Weiss (2013) found that, during 2005–2008, mining in Sweden had less than half the rate of fatal occupational injuries of mining in

46 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Spain and New Zealand. Yet, mining in Australia had less than half the rate of occupational fatal injuries of mining in Sweden. That comparison study also consistently identifies the mining industry as one of the most accident-prone sector, regardless of country. Within this, safety records also vary depending on the type of mining involved. Nelson (2011) showed that opencast mines are safer than underground mines, and that underground coal mining has higher accident rates than other underground operations. This is to say that it is difficult to unequivocally establish the safety performance of the mining industry as a whole, and that much remains to be done in this regard. In such a situation, as is the case with health issues, safety measures might not only produce different effects in different contexts, but the effects will be complex, improving some areas while worsening others. Tbl. 3.4 presents the causes of accidents in the Swedish mining industry during the 1980s. It shows “fall of person” as the most common cause of accidents, followed closely by object-handling accidents. Other common causes were strikes by falling objects, contact with machine parts, vehicles etc., and overexertion. The first two causes (but, to a lesser extent, also the other causes) relate to the physical and manual nature of mining work at the time.

Table 3.4: Causes of accidents in Swedish mining, 1980–1984.59

Cause Count Frequency Proportion

Electrical accidents 28 0.5 1% Fire, explosion, blasting 50 0.8 1% Contact with chemical element 70 1.1 1% Contact with heat or cold 127 2.1 3% Fall of person 833 13.5 17% Step on uneven surface, misstep, step on nail 265 4.3 5% Other contact with stationary object 430 7.0 9% Struck by ﬂying object, spatter etc. 444 7.2 9% Struck by falling object 535 8.7 11% Other contact with machine part, vehicle, etc. in motion 599 9.7 12% Over exertion of body part 605 9.8 12% Object handling accidents 706 11.5 15% Other 129 2.1 3% Total 4,841 78.7 100%

During the 2010s, tbl. 3.5 (which also includes figures for the manufacturing in-

59Data for this table comes from Sweden’s National Board of Occupational Safety and Health and Statistics Sweden. The frequency was calculated using figures from Statistics Sweden.

47 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

dustry), the most common cause of accidents was, by far, loss of control (for example, loss of control of machinery).60 While factors relating to manual and physical labour still are significant regarding accidents in this period, machine- and equipment-related causes dominate the figures. Additionally, virtually all frequencies of occurrence decreased at this time (except, perhaps, loss of control, which the first period evaluated, in comparison, does not readily list as a cause). As mining becomes more mechanised and automated, accidents involving machines are bound to be more common, especially when assuming that mechanisation and automation decrease other accidents.

Table 3.5: Causes of accidents in Swedish mining and manufacturing, 2010–2014.61

Cause Count Frequency Proportion

Mining and quarrying Electrical, explosion, fire 23 0.6 4% Leak, outflow, overflow 19 0.5 12% Collapse, fall, breakage of material 68 4.6 12% Loss of control 206 5.0 37% Fall of person 106 2.6 19% Body movement without any physical stress 29 0.7 5% Body movement under or with physical stress 91 2.2 17% Shock, fright, violence, aggression, threat 1 - - Other 8 0.2 1% Total 551 13.4

Manufacturing Electrical, explosion, fire 238 0.1 1% Leak, outflow, overflow 723 0.3 2% Collapse, fall, breakage of material 2,317 0.9 8% Loss of control 14,579 5.4 50% Fall of person 4,825 1.8 17% Body movement without any physical stress 1,676 0.6 6% Body movement under or with physical stress 4,396 1.6 15% Shock, fright, violence, aggression, threat 152 0.1 1% Other 300 0.1 1% Total 29,206 10.9

60Note though that the classification system changed significantly between the 1980s and 2010s, making it difficult to fully compare the two periods. 61Data for this table comes from the Swedish Work Environment Authority.

48 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Tbl. 3.5 also presents figures for the Swedish manufacturing industry in comparison to the mining industry. This comparison shows that the two industries are similar in their proportions regarding causes of accidents. Loss of control is a more common cause of accident in manufacturing than in mining, which may be because factors such as leak, outflow, overflow, collapse, fall, and breakage of material are more common in mining (in other words, causes that likely are due to the mining environment). Based on these figures, accident causes in mining are similar to those in manufacturing. However, almost all accident causes are more frequent in mining; given a thousand employees, for every ten accidents in manufacturing there would be thirteen in mining. At the same time, notable is that the character of mining accidents have changed, in that they are now more similar to those of other industries.62 Making sense of this all requires looking closer at mining operations and their complex and potentially high-risk environments. The physical and technical environment of the mining industry form one part of the situation. Hartman and Mutmansky (2002, 32) described the character of accidents in mines as being due to “falls of earth, strata gases that are emitted into the mine atmosphere, the explosive nature of mineral fuels when in the form of dust, and the many types of heavy equipment used in the mining process.” Similarly, Laurence (2011, 1559) observed that “One of the reasons that hazards in mining are so great is because of the significant energies involved, be they gravitational, mechanical, chemical, electrical, or other types.” Given that the mining industry has mainly increased its productivity through larger machines, bigger loads, and so on (e.g., Hartman and Mutmansky 2002), mechanisation introduces more harmful energies (see the below), while also providing protection from them. Recall, as well, that Nelson (2011) identified differences between open-pit mines, underground mines, and coal mines, which also alludes to the specific environments of mining as significantly affecting safety, etc. The occurrences of accidents in mining are tied to the presence of energies (Haddon Jr 1963), and accident prevention, therefore, depends on the ability to control those energies (Haddon Jr. 1973); this control, and thus protection, often comes in the form of technology. Other factors also play a role in accidents. For example, Swedish figures from SveMin (2016) show that accidents that occur due to “energies” (i.e., gravitational, mechanical, chemical, and so on) are comparatively rare (compared to, for example,

62This illustration can be compared to figures from the US mining industry (see https://www.cdc. gov/niosh/mining/statistics/MiningFactSheets.html), which show that a majority of mining accidents in the US are due to the handling of materials and the slip or fall of persons. Those leading causes, in statistics of the US mining industry, are then followed by that of machinery, but with less than half the distribution in numbers. Statistics for the two countries are not fully comparable, but roughly the current situation of the US mining industry parallels that of the Swedish mining industry in the 1980s, given the relative prevalence of material handling and fall accidents, compared to loss of control accidents.

49 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

US figures).63 By comparison, walking, jumping, or tripping accounted for around 22 per cent of all accidents in SveMin’s findings, and service and repair accounted for almost 40 per cent. Moreover, deaths in the Swedish mining industry, lately, have been related to maintenance activities. For the Australian mining industry, Lenné et al. (2012) and Patterson and Shappell (2010) found that around nine out of ten accidents were triggered by human action (e.g., operator errors or violations). Patterson and Shappell (2010) found that, in the Australian mining industry, unsafe leadership was present in a third of the cases, whereas Lenné et al. (2012) found that organisational influences were present in two thirds of the Australian cases. Laurence (2011) concluded that many accidents in mining are caused by lack of awareness or non- compliance with rules, poor communication, production taking priority over safety, inadequate training, and so on. In other words, the safety situation in mining is not explained solely with reference to the presence of harmful energies, and, therefore, technology must go beyond mere protection from such energy to be able to improve safety. Other studies have found non-linear relationships between technology and safety in the mining industry. Laflamme and Blank (1996, 486), in studying age-related accident risks in the Swedish mining industry, concluded that “the transformation of production processes in the mine had a more rapid beneficial impact on work productivity than on accident risks.” They also found that the changes in work (e.g., due to technology) favoured older workers, in the context of safety. However, this difference found in this study is not necessarily due to age, alone. Laflamme and Blank suggest younger workers are more exposed to workload and injury risk, compared to older workers, because the physical and technical environments of the younger workers are more hazardous, and the younger workers lack experience of dealing with the conditions. Blank et al. (1998) studied injury risks faced by underground miners in a Swedish iron-ore mine. The study focused on changes to productivity and time worked over a 41-year period (specifically, as measurements of risk expressed in injury per produced unit and hours worked). They found that safety was improved, to the extent that technology decreased risk exposure, but they also noted that “The extent to which this is a reflection solely of technological differences is … debatable, since several factors might confound any relationship found between technological development and injury” (Blank et al. 1998, 272). Blank, Diderichsen, and Andersson (1996) investigated technological development and occupational accidents in the same mining company over a time period spanning

63Between 2011 and 2015, just under ten per cent of all accidents were due to mucking, falling rock, or traffic. Such accidents are potentially extremely dangerous, however they caused no fatalities for this particular period. This is not to downplay the significance of these accidents, but, rather, to highlight that the focus of accidents-prevention efforts in the industry must be wide.

50 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ approximately eighty years (1911–1990). They found that three factors affected the likelihood of accidents: mechanisation, reduction in working hours, and unemployment. Here, mechanisation was found to significantly correlate to an increased overall accident risk. Blank, Diderichsen, and Andersson (1996) argue that this accident increase may be because mechanisation usually coincides with work intensification and work condition deterioration, or because machines that were introduced had poor protection and were inadequately adapted. Increased unemployment, too, meant an increased annual accident rate; the authors suggest this accident increase may be because a decrease in labour union bargaining power, or that unemployment led to increased overtime and work intensity. For mortality rates, the study showed that automation and mechanisation led to lower figures:

There is a relationship between technological development and occupational accidents [but] this relationship is conditional on other factors … [W]hen … taken into account, it becomes clear that changes in technology are not sufficient in themselves fully to explain variations in accident frequencies. (Blank, Diderichsen, and Andersson 1996, 144.)

Regarding the US mining industry, Hartman and Mutmansky (2002) argued that the improved accident rate between 1910 and 2000 was due to: fewer fires and ex- plosions (1910–1930); fewer employed miners and better ventilation (early 1930s); mechanisation, social enlightenment, and production decline (1950–1960); and more surface mining and federal legislation (1960–1985). Studies that have investigated accidents in the mining industry have tended to focus on machine-related accidents. Among the important takeaways from those studies are the findings of Groves, Kecojevic, and Komljenovic (2007) that there is a pronounced difference between fatal and non-fatal accidents within the mining industry. For example, they found that, while material handling accounted for 54 per cent of non- fatal accidents, powered haulage and machinery, together, accounted for 51 per cent of fatal accidents. The type of machine involved in accidents also differed: the most common type of machinery involved in fatalities were haulage trucks and other heavy machinery. For non-fatal accidents, non-powered hand tools were involved in 24 per cent of the accidents; this amount is three times more than that of the second most common machinery (rock or roof bolting machines) included. Ruff, Coleman, and Martini (2011) added to these findings that 25 per cent of all injuries and fatalities occurred during maintenance or repair of machinery. It is important here to note statistics regarding contractors. Muzaffar et al. (2013, 1342) concluded that “the odds of a fatal versus nonfatal injury were nearly three times higher for contractors than that for operators during 1998–2007.” For Swedish mining, Blank et al. (1995, 34) similarly concluded:

51 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry

… a considerable part of dangerous jobs in the mining industry are performed by contractor workers. Contractors seem to get injured more often and sustain more severe injuries. They also perform other tasks and work under other conditions than mining company employees when in- curring injuries.

Already mining companies use contractors to cover areas where they do not have in-house competence. It is possible that such practices will be extended to address the lack of a sufficient workforce, in general.64 This type of workforce arrangement makes for more difficult organisation, both for the purposes of safety and otherwise.65 Technology, even when specifically addressing accidents, has a multifaceted relationship with safety. The design of the technology, its integration into organisation, and how maintenance is performed and by who, are all factors that influence the effects of technology on safety (and other matters). There is a problem, however, in the general perception of how mining accidents occur. Many statistics show the loss of control of machinery as the primary cause of accidents in mining; this is true in the sense that the loss of control is what ultimately leads to the accident, but such an analysis also tends to put a focus on who lost control rather than the actual machinery. Thus, a common belief in the mining industry is that most accidents are due to human error (Simpson, Horberry, and Joy 2009). Yet, while nine out of ten accidents are engendered by a human action (e.g., an unsafe act by an operator), the root cause of accidents is usually a combination of factors. The studies by Lenné et al. (2012) and Patterson and Shappell (2010), mentioned earlier, found that organisational factors were present in up to two-thirds of mining accidents; factors related to unsafe leadership were present in one-third of cases. For some situations, environmental conditions affected more than half of all mining accidents; the technical environment was involved in one-third of the accidents, and the physical environment was involved in up to around 55 per cent of the total. Even where one could perhaps put the blame for an accident on the operator directly, such as with violation, in reality these situations are not that simple. Simpson, Horberry, and Joy (2009, 8) highlighted the complexity of the issue:

… the most important aspect to appreciate in relation to violation errors is that while intentional, they are not necessarily malicious or simply a result of laziness. For example, failure to wear Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) may be a function of it being uncomfortable or the correct PPE not being readily available. Alternatively, failure to use the

64In fact, there already are cases of this happening. Kaunis Iron, with a mine in northern Sweden, uses solely contractors for all mining operations, and only white-collar employees are directly employed by the company. 65For a thorough and important discussion on this topic, see Nygren (2018).

52 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

correct tool or replacement part during maintenance may be a function of availability, and failure to complete all required checks … may be a function of supervisory or other pressures to ‘get the job started again’ etc.

The design of technology and its implementation have clear influence, in other words, on the potentiality of accidents. As noted, beyond human errors, around half of all underground mining accidents directly involve the physical or technical environment in some way (Lenné et al. 2012; Patterson and Shappell 2010), where the technical environment concerns, also, the design and construction of equipment. Worryingly, resulting accidents are not necessarily due to complex shortcomings. Many accidents happen because of confusing or contradicting control layouts. In mining, one machine may have one set of controls, and a similar machine may have a different set of controls; typically, if machines, in general, are similar, it is normally expected that their controls will be be similar, as well (Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011; Lenné et al. 2012; Patterson and Shappell 2010). There are plenty more examples like the ones described above, concerning accident factors and conditions (see, for example, Simpson, Horberry, and Joy 2009; Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011). The point here is not to review all possible examples, but to illustrate the far-from-simple relationships that exists between technology and social factors in such circumstances. Another important point is that, in most cases, the illustrated “phenomena” extend beyond safety and health and into other areas of a social character. This account should serve to illustrate the inability of singular technological efforts to solve complex social issues in mining, among which safety is one of those issues. Before concluding this chapter, I will explore this notion in more detail.

On Addressing Workplace Issues in the Mining Industry

The idea motivating the review within this chapter is to highlight the ways in which different developments have affected the workplaces, as well as the workforce, of the mining industry. Within this, this review focuses on select issues, arguing that the mechanisms that can be observed within those issues are also general to most workplace-level matters in mining industry at-large. The main takeaway here is that none of the issues at hand can be dealt with, or even considered, in isolation; the situation that faces the workplaces of the mining industry are multifaceted, interrelated, and complex. Making the workplaces of the mining industry attractive will mean addressing this complex reality. If the account in the sections above gave the impression that technology is the problem, this is not my intention. Rather, my intention in this chapter is to illustrate that

53 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry technology will have a central position in creating successful solutions to the identified problems. As the next chapter expands upon, all interventions in a workplace involve technology. However, the context of mining workplaces requires rethinking what is meant by technology, as well as reevaluating technology’s role and design. Implementing technology into this complex context, to address it and its resulting effects, is already the mining industry’s approach to problem-solving, however the understanding or view of technology within the mining industry is much too narrow do so successfully. The view of technology within the mining industry is lacking in its consideration of social dimensions. Indeed, the industry may find itself unable to navigate this complex reality precisely because it does not include social aspects in its view of its own challenges. Without including non-technical aspects into the consideration of these problems, the problems then appear to be much simpler than they really are; in viewing each issue in isolation, they appear, automatically, as having both simple and clear-cut solutions. In such a view, solutions, then, take the form of technology: automation will improve safety, remote-control and virtual reality will ensure a future workforce, and battery-power will lessen the environmental impact. Technology such as remote control can improve safety, however not all safety issues come down to the presence of operators in dangerous areas, which is what such a view assumes. Indeed, remote technology, itself, imposes new risks. Ultimately, safe technology is unsafe if not used correctly—a result that often stems from the workforce not accepting or trusting the new technology, for example (Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2011). The mining industry, in other words, is “techno-centric.” Again, this is not to discard all technology as unsuitable, but, rather, this is to suggest that technology alone, and in its current form, falls short of accomplishing what it intends to achieve, within these circumstances. Indeed, technology may even worsen the situation. The attention to technical solutions in the industry tends to focus only on a technical perspective, even when seeking to solve social challenges. Problems stemming from such a faulty position find no help from the other constraints within the mining industry, such as constraints that lead to slower technological change and that require technology to adhere to other logics. No a priori right way of addressing these issues exists, even if considering a multitude of perspectives in resolving them. Or, rather, there are many ways of addressing these challenges. The issues all affect each other, resulting in trade-off situations wherein interests must be weighed both together and against each other; an intervention that is positive for one area might be negative for another. This unsuitability of one-off interventions means that several measures must be brought to bear against the problems. That said, this thesis identifies the centrality of a workplace perspective; the purpose of the workplace focus in this thesis is to suggest that any solution must consider the workplace perspective, even in cases where interventions target the

54 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ surrounding society, for example. To the extent that the challenges of the mining industry have social effects, the challenges cannot be demarcated from the workplace. The workplace represents a nexus for many of the issues discussed in this chapter— here, human activity takes place. The wider issues of social sustainability (under which workplace attractiveness should be included; see Paper IV) constitute a good example of the centrality of a workplace perspective. Horberry et al. (2013), for instance, demonstrate how considering issues related to the work environment in mining contributes to sustainability— it can: improve the health and safety of employees, contractors, and the surrounding community; develop effective emergency response procedures; and facilitate responsible product design and use. Outside of the mining industry, several studies have identified convergent areas between work environment and sustainability, as well as how the former can contribute to the latter (cf. Bolis, Brunoro, and Sznelwar 2014; Haslam and Waterson 2013; Radjiyev et al. 2015). Bolis, Brunoro, and Sznelwar (2014) connect social sustainability to work-related issues, such as worker participation in defining sustainability policies, social inclusion of all types of workers, and promotion of health and safety. They also identify several studies that note the possible benefit of introducing work environment considerations into sustainability policies to improve the attraction and retention of a qualified workforce. If, on the other hand, sustainability policies have a too-narrow focus, the same policies can have negative impacts. An inability to solve issues relating first to health and safety and then, by extension, to attractiveness, leads to an increase of unsustainable practices. Examples of this conundrum include an over-reliance on a fly-in/fly-out workforce and the inherent creating of associated problems that come with that (Abrahamsson et al. 2014), and the development of one-sided, low-qualifying jobs in effort to lessen the depen- dence on a qualified workforce. In essence, “Good planning of sustainability policies cannot exclude the consideration of social aspects” (Bolis, Brunoro, and Sznelwar 2014, 1227). Indeed, the mining industry does not, in fact, address all of its challenges via technology. The industry also applies “macro-level” strategies, such as providing education and healthcare to support social sustainability or increasing mining industry presence in high schools so as to attract young people into the industry. Such strategies may be of importance, but they do not necessarily address the problems where they occur and in a way that is appropriate for the character of the problems, themselves, as indicated above. For matters such as obtaining a social license to operate, mining companies are typically required to engage in processes that seek the input of the surrounding society regarding the mining operations. While the actual ability of these processes to ensure sustainable practice is debatable (Poelzer et al. 2020), for decision-making processes to be influenced by a wide array of perspectives is conducive to positive outcomes for the

55 Chapter 3 The Mining Industry matters covered in this thesis. In fact, when limited to a workplace level, participatory processes have been suggested as central to addressing work environment issues in the mining industry (Burgess-Limerick et al. 2012; Horberry, Burgess-Limerick, and Steiner 2018, 2011; Horberry et al. 2016; McPhee 2004). McPhee (2004, 401) argues for the “cooperative interchange between expert and non-expert to find satisfactory solutions to a range of problems especially where there needs to be trade- offs and compromises.” Similarly, Laurence (2011), among others, has argued against more control and rules for improving the work environment of the mining industry. Laurence is in favour of the application of frameworks with few, but high-quality, rules—rules whose strength may reside in the process through which those very rules are established (ensuring that there is a positive safety culture, for instance, and open, well-working communication channels). This thesis will now expand upon these themes, on the foundation that the pursuit of a priori correct solutions, and definitive, unequivocal criteria and requirements, to the problems being addressed, is ultimately unfruitful. A shift to include social dimensions in problem-solving means that such criteria will always fall short of being exhaustive, because the very character of social demands means constantly shifting requirements. Instead, process-based focus is required; the consideration of humans and designing on their terms, and thus, by extension, giving people the ability to influence that which affects them, best addresses the challenges ahead. The next chapter grounds this assertion in theory.

56 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework

This thesis has, thus far, provided some arguments as to why we need a process for creating attractive workplaces in the mining industry. This thesis has also, based on the context in which mining workplaces exist, suggested some features of such a process. However, to fully develop such a process, an understanding of how technical and social factors interact and interrelate is needed. The theoretical framework developed within this chapter serves to frame that understanding; here, there are two important focal points. First, the process through which attractive workplaces can be created—essentially, the management of the interplay between technology and social factors. Second, how technology can support this development. This chapter, thus, intentionally puts less focus on how social factors, individual people, can support this process—that is, which demands may be put on them; this thesis builds upon the assumption that technology should be adapted to people, not the other way around. Of course, organisational process can (and has to) support such a process, however this chapter includes these concepts under the framework of technology. Three theoretical approaches inform the perspectives developed within this chapter. Sociotechnology makes up the foundation of the analysis, providing an initial framework through which to understand the interaction between technical and social systems. This interaction is one that the other two approaches—social studies of technology and institutional pragmatism—can enhance, within the overall framework. Specifically, these latter two perspectives help in explaining what happens in the process of implementing technology—that is, the entire journey of technology, as a whole, from a technology developer on to a mine and its workplaces. Mumford (2006) has noted the many positive possibilities of sociotechnical principles but also the lack of description as to how to bring them about; these positive scenarios describe end products. In expanding on sociotechnical thought, this chapter provides the foundations from which a tentative path to sociotechnical implementations can be plotted—or, in the language of this thesis, how the mining industry can go about creating attractive workplaces. Sociotechnology is the notion that systems are best understood, and perform best, when acknowledging that they have both technical and social components. The two systems are symbiotic in such a way that it is only if both parts are “optimised” that the system performs well. Systems, furthermore, must be understood broadly. Tra-

57 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework ditionally, focus in sociotechnical studies is on the workplace or work system. The emergence of macro-ergonomics in the field (e.g., Holden, Rivera, and Carayon 2015) has led to a widened focus and inclusion of the influence of society on work systems and vice versa. Within this, some developments have even connected ergonomics to ecological sustainability (e.g., García-Acosta et al. 2014). The field of sociotechnology, then, appears to be well-suited for the matter of attractive workplaces, given its connection to aspects that exist outside of the workplace. Yet, the view of technology within sociotechnology, and its related field of ergonomics, remains too rigid. This chapter, thus, introduces into sociotechnology a notion of technology that extends beyond its physical representations or artefacts. On the one hand, this means that technology must come to include practices that surround the physical artefact; on the other hand, those practices, organisational and otherwise, are technology themselves.66 Such a conceptualisation holds technology as including “soft” (or social) technology. In this shift of perspective, technology is no longer clearly delineated by physical and rigid artefacts, and in turn, the associated theoretical fields, such as the travel-of- ideas, offer much insight into the implementation and effect of technology. The adding to sociotechnology, in this way, shifts—or introduces another—focus of such analytical approaches, from a perspective of optimisation of systems to one of process. At minimum, such a change is necessary to the extent that current perspectives view optimisation as possible by looking at the system from the outside and a priori advocating for certain measures therein.67

Sociotechnical Thought: Humanistic and Democratic Workplaces

Sociotechnical thought is closely associated with the Tavistock Institute. Researchers from this institute were sent to investigate the problems of the British coal industry. The industry had mechanised its operations during the inter-war period, replacing its manual systems with semi-automated longwall operations. Yet, the industry did not experience the productivity gains that it expected from the mechanisation, and workers left the industry despite better pay and working conditions. In short, what the Tavistock researchers found (see, e.g., Bamforth and Trist 1951) was that the

66There is a discussion, at least in Sweden, on the distinction between technique (teknik) and technology (teknologi), wherein the former refers to the application of knowledge and so on. I do not maintain such a distinction here; instead, I view both as technology; the later sections of this chapter provide argument as to why. 67Carayon et al. (2015), whose study is covered below, imply the need for such change, but they neither highlight the importance of certain factors (such as “actors”) nor do they follow the implications of their suggested “emergent properties” to all relevant implications.

58 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ new, semi-automated operations required work to be organised like that of a fac- tory. That is, work was divided into small, divided tasks over several shifts; the shift crews were spread out over wide geographical areas and did not meet each other; and, organising these operations required central staff management, whereas before workers had autonomy in planning and executing their tasks. Later, however, the same researchers found a mine where the newer, mechanised method did work very well— productivity was higher than in other comparable mines, for example. Here, workers themselves had organised their work, and their organising included a broad range of work roles within which the workers rotated between tasks and shifts. The Tavistock researchers concluded that this had resulted in social and technical system harmonising, whereas the work organisation in those other mines had prevented such harmonisation (Bamforth and Trist 1951; Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull 2019). For the technical and social to harmonise, each must be given equal weight. Tech- nology and its associated work structures make up the technical system, whereas the social system includes grouping of individuals into teams, coordination, control, and boundary management (Mumford 2006). The technical system limits the possibilities to shape work organisations, and the social system has social and psychological dimensions that are independent of the technical conditions (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull 2019). Historically, sociotechnical design was evaluated to determine if it had led to efficient use of technology and improvement in the quality of working life of employees. In practice, this meant ensuring that technical and human factors were given equal weight in the design process; advocates of sociotechnology saw it as important that employees were involved in determining the required quality of working-life improvements (Mumford 2006). And, due to of the system-theoretical foundations, feedback has had an important role; to be able to adapt actions and create a holistic picture of the systems, workers need to be informed regarding production quality, quantity, and so on (Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull 2019). These early investigations into sociotechnology tend to emphasise that there was organisational choice available within the limits established by particular technologies. Such an assertion was contrary to contemporary belief, which saw work organisation as strictly determined by technology. Traditionally, tough, sociotechnical theory has seen technology as a given and affording only limited space for the social system to change, as Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull (2019) argue. Later developments in sociotechnology view sociotechnical systems as complex systems, wherein “the synergistic combination of humans, machines, environments, work activities and organisational structures … comprise a given enterprise” (Carayon et al. 2015, 550). This most recent view affords more room for change within the system itself, even if this is still not always formally recognised. Sociotechnology is more than a scientific theory, however; two of the discipline’s most important values are the need to humanise work through the redesign of jobs, and

59 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework democracy at work (Mumford 2006). The application of such values is not possible if the social systems do not receive as much attention as the technical systems. And, while this notion has been interpreted differently over the years, there is agreement that the definitions of human needs must come from those associated with or affected by the technology, meaning “that democratic and participative communication and decision-making must be available to give these people a voice” (Mumford 2006, 321). Mumford argues, further, that supporters of sociotechnical approaches stress that the means are as important as the ends; if the desire is for humanised and well-functioning workplaces, then the change process must encompass humanistic strategies, as well. In practice, these values may take many forms. To explore such forms fully is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, to summarise the basis of sociotechnology, I rely on the succinct principles provided by Cherns (1976):

• Compatibility: The objective and process of design must match. • Minimal critical specification: Only what is absolutely necessary should be specified. • The sociotechnical criterion: Deviations from expected norms and standards should be controlled as close to the source as possible, if they cannot be eliminated. • The multifunctionaility principle: There needs to be a redundancy of functions so that there can be adaptability and learning. • Boundary location: Boundaries must allow for knowledge and experience to be shared. • Information: Information must go to where it is needed for action first. • Support congruence: Systems must be designed so that they facilitate desired social behaviours. • Design and human values: High quality work means: that jobs must be reason- ably demanding; there must be opportunity to learn; there is the possibility of decision-making; there is social support; being able to relate work to social life; and that work leads to a desirable future. • Incompletion: Design is an iterative process that never stops.

While sociotechnical theory has expanded beyond these core principles, they are still inherent to many sociotechnical approaches, even if implicitly. One of latest developments in sociotechnical theory comes from Carayon et al. (2015); their addition is in the highlighting of the non-static interactions within sociotechnical systems. An example of such interactions is that of workers adapting to the sociotechnical system which, in turn, further adapts the system itself. Carayon et al. (2015) refer to this phenomenon as symbiotic interaction. Symbiotic interaction is the notion of open systems that treats systems as both open and embedded in environments that affect the way the systems behave, and it also holds that these environments, in turn, are embedded in external environments that affect them (Mumford 2006). However,

60 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ unlike traditional systems theory, sociotechnical theory (as described by Carayon et al. 2015) does not assume systems components to be deconstructable into discrete units and events, such that they can be individually analysed. Relationships in symbiotic interaction are indirect; their form is not given a priori but, rather, arises from the actual interactions within the system and between other systems. “Emergent properties” (the system theoretical label for this phenomenon), Carayon et al. (2015, 550) argue, “arise only when components interact and are not exhibited within the behaviour of individual components.”68 Work systems, in this sense, then, are “created” in the interaction between social and technical systems or components. While a designer, in creating components, can actively influence the technical subsystems, the work system is never fully “designed” by a designer (nor should it be, if sociotechnical principles are to be followed). In other words, what is designed to happen is different from what actually happens (Carayon et al. 2015). On these grounds, Carayon et al. (2015) propose a concentric sociotechnical model. This model consists of the worker—the human—at the centre, then the work system, then socio-organisational context, and finally the external environment. Im- portantly, this model is not hierarchical—rather, it acknowledges that outer layers are permeable and influence properties of each level through proximate and distal layers. In this model, the work system is the local context in which work activities take place. The socio-organisational system, then, refers to the social and organisational culture and structures within the organisation (Carayon et al. 2015). The external environment represents the social, legal, and political environment (the external environment, in light of the later sections, could also be referred to as the institutional environment), and this includes the demographic context, as well. Carayon et al. (2015) note that the broader demographic influences organisations, their culture, and so on. This demographic is, essentially, the concern of work attractiveness, in that it is the “target” of the attractiveness. The demographic viewpoints, wishes, desires, etc. must be taken into consideration in design, so as to make work systems suitable for that demographic. What is more, regarding issues of social acceptance and the like, this layer has a significant, if not final, influence—ultimately deciding what is socially acceptable or not. In the same manner in which the technical system can introduce boundaries around the social system, the surrounding economic system determines the sociotechnical system’s boundary conditions. Therefore, management (on all levels) has what Abra- hamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull (2019) call a “border patrol” function—for example, by limiting influence.69 Mumford (2006) notes in this situation the powerful

68Mumford (2006, 330) similarly argues that “The sociotechnical supporters believed that ‘quality of working life’ was an emergent value” (my emphasis). 69It is not possible to limit all influence. The symbiotic interaction in (sociotechnical) systems means

61 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework economic climates that affect businesses and the way the businesses operate. In particular, when in combination with strong corporate cultures, such a situation tends to mean that notions such as “one best way” and clearly-prescribed ways of doing things take precedence over alternative approaches. In this way, the external environment influences and constrains the socio-organisational environment and, in turn, the work system. This also means that there is a degree to which sociotechnical systems are artificially constrained. The corresponding model developed by Carayon et al. (2015) focuses on safety, but it does not have to be specific to that topic. Rather, I argue that the same reasoning can be applied to any emergent property of sociotechnical systems; the attractiveness of a work system or workplace is such an emergent property. For example, the inclusion of individual components in a work system (work rotation, good pay, flexible hours, etc.), with each being separately attractive (Åteg, Hedlund, and Pontén 2004), does not directly result in an attractive work system. It is only when workers, themselves— as “components” within the system—interact with other system components, that the character of the “attractiveness property” emerges.

Sociotechnology and Attractive Workplaces

Thus far, this thesis has not brought up in any detail the actual characteristics of attractive workplaces. Research on this topic, while somewhat sparse, does exist (e.g., Åteg, Hedlund, and Pontén 2004; Hedlund 2007; Åteg and Hedlund 2011; Biswas et al. 2017; see also Ehrhart and Ziegert 2005). In Lööw et al. (2018), we dedicate a chapter to applying this research to the mining industry. The omission of the same in this thesis is due to the thesis’ focus on process; attention to particular characteristics would detract from the purposes of such an approach. This is not to contest that workplaces that are perceived as attractive do not exhibit the characteristics identified in this research. Rather, it is to say that, knowing of these characteristics and then, in turn, implementing them, is the task of importance. Importantly—and one of the main points here—this process is not specific to attractive workplaces, as such; it is a process that is common to navigating the field of sociotechnical interaction, in general. Choosing to focus this thesis on workplace attractiveness is a way of defining the study; in terms of investigating sociotechnical interplay, workplace attractiveness is an illustrative topic. Workplace attractiveness has the advantage of also being a topic that interests the mining industry. The concept could, in this sense, stand in for other social issues within the industry, or at least those issues with a connection to local, workplace perspectives. That said, by studying these processes, one can make claims about how the characteristics of attractive workplaces can be facilitated.

that components will always influence each other and across several levels. However, managers— and designers too, for that matter—can limit active influence and the like.

62 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

It is worth noting here that interest in sociotechnical theory during the 1960s and 1970s in Europe was due to expanding industry that, at the same time, had labour difficulties: “They had problems obtaining staff and were scared of losing those they had” (Mumford 2006, 324). In fact, Mumford claims that almost all interest in the concept during the 1970s was due to these issues. However, even if management also sought to improve quality of life at the time, solving labour shortages was the prime motivation for the consideration of such theory. Not only is sociotechnical thought conducive to creating attractive workplaces, the process is, necessarily, itself sociotechnical (cf. the principle of compatibility). This claim has implications for current perspectives on workplace attractiveness, particularly with regards to what such attractiveness “is.” First, the discussion on workplace attractiveness should not be reduced solely to the ability of an organisation to secure labour.70 An organisation or workplace that has all the labour it requires is not necessarily attractive; plenty of jobs are either unattractive or have significant potential for improvement yet do not have a shortage of staff. Likewise, an organisation that cannot secure enough labour is not necessarily unattractive. However, questions of attractiveness tend to become salient when organisations are unable to recruit labour; an organisation that has all the labour it needs might not be interested in whether it is actually attractive or not. Moreover, an organisation could have all its “workforce needs” fulfilled but then see demands for a larger workforce—an inability to recruit does not have to mean that the organisation is unattractive. There is also a distinction between attractive workplaces and attractive organisations or employers. For instance, an organisation can be attractive even if its work is not (Åteg and Hedlund 2011). In the end, though, both organisation and workplaces must be attractive; if the organisation attracts, its workplaces cannot, then, repel. Such division would suggest that attracting and retaining labour are separate problems, but some researchers have, instead, phrased it as a single problem of attractiveness (e.g., Hedlund 2007)—attractive work is work that people both like having (retention) and want to have (attraction). A discussion of work that attracts but does not retain is not productive; all organisations involve work, and so attractive organisations must also provide attractive workplaces.

70Much of the existent literautre talks of attractive work as opposed to attractive workplaces. I try mostly to avoid the term attractive work here because of I find it hard to demarcate work from other activities; with definitions such as work being “doing in the sphere of necessity” (Karlsson 2013, 2004), the concepts that I develop in this chapter become difficult to apply. Instead, I use the term attractive workplaces. Workplaces as conceptualised in sociotechnical theory, particularly in Carayon et al. (2015), implies the physical elements of the work system and presupposes some formal organisation of these places of work. Toconduct my analysis without some sort of structural division I do not think is possible without modification of the theoretical framework. In accounting for the literature in this section, however, I generally use the terms introduced by those writings themselves. And, in earlier publications, I too have used the term “attractive work.”

63 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework

Thus, questions of labour attraction and retention—and indeed, the question of attractive organisations, in general—are questions of workplace attractiveness. In line with the “dual goal of ergonomics” of improving system performance as well as well- being (International Ergonomics Association 2017), one could say that designing attractive work strives for system performance through well-being.71 Meaning, if a work system does not provide good enough workplaces, this will inhibit its performance through a lack of resources (cf. Carayon and Smith 2000). When it comes to the actual design of attractive work systems, a focus on (individual) factors or components is not sufficiently helpful. As noted, previous research has identified factors that contribute to making work attractive (e.g., Åteg, Hedlund, and Pontén 2004). These factors feature within attractive work systems, certainly, but their unique significance in each system, and for each individual, is so dependent on those very systems and individuals that knowing of them and trying to accommodate for them (a priori) is not enough. Thus, previous research has demonstrated that the creation of attractive work systems is possible when considering factors that feature in such systems. However, how the creation of attractive work systems is to be ac- complished is not as clear (cf. Mumford 2006), nor is how to find a balance in cases where all important factors cannot be fulfilled or are conflicting. In an attractive work system, in which people want to both work and keep working, individual and subjective views on attractiveness become central. A work system, as either attractive or unattractive, ultimately depends on the perspectives of individuals. In this vein, Hedlund (2007) proposed that work attractiveness has both an internal and external perspective. In the external perspective, an individual judges the work from the “outside,” for instance as someone seeking employment or deciding upon a job. This person is outside of the work system and in the socio-organisational or external environment. In the internal perspective, an individual judges the work from the “inside,” for example someone who is already employed at the workplace in question. This person is in the work system. In this sense, a work system can be simultaneously attractive and unattractive, such as attractive internally but not exter- nally. Crucially, individuals, being either inside or outside the work system, “classify” the system. Defining attractiveness, then, as only the ability to recruit labour is unsuitable. For Hedlund (2007), only when work is attractive from both the internal and external

71This is potentially a problematic statement, because it may be taken to read or suggest that we can be tricked into work that we otherwise would not accept were it not for some enticing factor. In Paper IV, I reference Blauner (1964) and his finding that workers may be objectively alienated even if they do not subjectively experience that alienation (due to societal norms, for example). However, as I argue in that paper, only naïvely could one claim those jobs to be attractive, as in the long-term (objectively, even) well-being suffers. Still, this statement is more to illustrate the relation to ergonomics, rather than to identify well- being as the end and sole goal of attractive workplaces.

64 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ perspectives can work be classified as attractive; meaning, this is a classification that must arise from perspectives both inside and outside of the work system. A significant portion of workplace attractiveness, then, comes down to perspectives. Sociotechnology, as a discipline, is already is clear on the crucial need for wishes and desires of those implicated by technology to, in turn, influence technology to the same effect. Notably, these wishes and desires must stem, in part, from how people view technology.

An Extended Notion of Technology

While sociotechnology includes in its definition of the technical system the likes of routines, work organisation, and so on, the sociotechnical concept of technology is still too narrow for framing a process that can facilitate attractive workplaces. As noted, changing workplaces—meaning, making them attractive—will always involve technology. Failing to identify what technology is, then, limits the applicability of sociotechnology. The review by Mumford (2006) of the history of sociotechnology is illustrative in this regard. At several points she makes statements with the sentiment of “service jobs have very little reliance on technology, resting instead on a foundation of human skills of caring and support.” While it is true that such jobs may involve little physical technology, certainly routines under which such work is organised— such as which technique or strategy to use in meeting with customers, etc.—are technology (or at least involve its application), even by sociotechnical standards. A lack of attention to social factors in the workplace, even in social technology, can have negative outcomes. Thus, the notion of technology must include, or be understood as consisting of non-physical things, as well, wherein technology is “soft” as well as “hard.” Without this extension of the meaning of technology, we may come to overlook the role of organisational concepts (such as a safety programme, itself, rather than the workplaces just being safe) in affecting workplace attractiveness. A sociotechnical analysis of attractive workplaces must also be attentive to the process under which technology is created. Sociotechnological thought already identifies the importance of those affected by technology in being able to also influence technology. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume that such influence is only relevant at the point of implementation. Technology is created through sociotechnical networks, which means social factors have important bearing on the forming of technology, as well. Recognition of this factor is especially important in light of the fact that perceptions of technology influence the emergence of workplaces as either attractive or not. To expand sociotechnology in this way, I rely primarily on Eveland (1986) and Wa- jcman (2004). The argument that technology is information, put forward by Eveland (1986), helps to conceptualise technology as soft. He argues that, to be useful, tech-

65 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework nology must be conceptualised in the widest sense possible. Meaning, technology is not only (merely) hardware or physical objects; it is also knowledge about the physical and how it can be manipulated. As such, technology is information. Technology is, furthermore, important only to the extent that it can convey information about the physical and its manipulation.72 Eveland further argues that, at a minimum, the notion of technology must include both the tool and its uses (i.e., the purpose to which the tool is put). Technology is significantly behavioural, in that it cannot be understood outside of what it is used to accomplish and the purposes of its users. More succinctly, “Technology is information, and exists only to the degree that people can put it into practice and use it to achieve values” (Eveland 1986, 303). A navigational system for underground mines, for example, has no inherent value in and of itself; it is only when it is put to use by miners that it “becomes” technology. Moreover, only when the same navigational system can help miners to be safe (a value), does it exist; conversely, if the system is not seen as being able to provide such a function, it will not be used, and thus it will not exist. When applied to sociotechnical thought, the notion of “to harmonise with the social system” must take on the meaning that technology must also express the correct values (cf. the principle of compatibility)—or, at minimum, that its use cannot be not contrary to these values. For example, combining a concern with global heating along with the use of diesel-powered machines would be conflicting. With this notion of harmonisation factored into analysis, the division in sociotechnical theory between the social and the technical starts to dissolve,73 and there is no technology existing

72The following example may be helpful in understanding this alternative view on technology. Sup- pose that you have a liquid that, if you put it on a surface, that surface becomes shiny. In everyday language use, we would refer to this as a product (or something similar). Suppose, also, that you have a machine that, when used on a surface, also causes that surface to become shiny. While we could refer to this machine as a product, as well, we would, at the same time, call it technology. Wherein lies the difference between the two products? Why would we refer to one of them as technology, but not refer to the other one as technology, also? Certainly, the effects of both products are the same, and both also have physical representation. I hold that there is no meaningful difference between the two products—both are technology. In stating that technology is information, what is meant, in the above example, is that both products require information about how surfaces can be made shiny. That information has been applied differently in each of the two products, but they are both still technology. Similarly, to take an example that is closer to the subject matter of this thesis (albeit somewhat absurd): Safety technology can be a routine that requires one to shout so as to ensure that one’s work colleagues know roughly where one is… or, it can be a positioning system that utilises wifi or 5G technology to send this information to a smartphone. Both of these examples are examples of technology, and both build upon information (or knowledge) that knowing where oneself and others are located is important for safety. 73Eveland (1986) does maintain a distinction between “social technology” and other technology. For example, he notes education and social programs as “non-hardware” technologies, and refers to these as social technologies. Based on his writings, there is, seemingly, a distinction line from the

66 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ outside its use. Meaning, in that it is utilised by humans, the use of technology is social.74 This also means that technology cannot be understood in any way other than as sociotechnical; technology is inherently sociotechnical. Moreover, not only is technology sociotechnical, it is also formed by sociotechnical processes. Eveland’s concern is mainly with technology as it enters organisations. The process leading up to its entry, and how technology’s use by organisations and people relates to this process, is the focus of Wajcman (2004).75 Where Eveland argues that technology is information and can therefore be transformed directly, Wajcman more firmly acknowledges the importance of the physical artefacts and also highlights the institutional processes underlying our “rational” reasoning around them. For the purpose of this thesis, Wajcman’s most important argument is that technology extends far beyond physical artefacts, positing that it is sociotechnical networks that form technology. Wajcman does not suggest that technology is primarily non-physical in the way that Eveland (1986) does; she considers, rather, that technology is much more than the physical artefacts.76 Like Eveland (1986) argues, though, technology in Wajcman’s

application of technology: technology that aims to change people is social, and that which seeks to manipulate the physical worlds is just technology (judging by Eveland’s use of the terms). 74Relating schools of thought such as that of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), note the agency of non-humans—this could be taken to mean that non-humans can use technology, too. However— although this may be because I am not completely familiar with that field—the extent to which non-humans can have values and are able to use information is questionable; at least for the purpose of this thesis, technology must be viewed as used by humans (which is, thus, social). To a certain extent, Mumford, too, maintains the division between technical and social systems to be that which exists between humans and non-humans, saying: “the rights and needs of the employee must be given as high a priority as those of the non-human parts of the system” (Mumford 2006, 338). 75I rely extensively Wajcman (2004) for her summary of some of the most salient points of social studies of technology, and I also make use of some the arguments she builds. At the same time, Wajcman’s is a feminist perspective, while this thesis is not. I do not focus explicitly on questions of power, for example, or masculinity and femininity. I try, instead, to use the general insight from her study to guide my inquiry. For example, a recurring argument of Wajcman (2004, 27) reads along the lines of, “The result is that machinery is literally designed by men with men in mind—the masculinity of the technology becomes embedded in the technology itself.” My use of such statements is in abstracting this beyond the particularity of masculinity. Here, then, such a statement takes on the meaning of “technology is designed departing from the designers’ views/perceptions—their values, as expressed by technology, become embedded in the technology itself.” That is, I argue that the mechanisms or phenomena in question are not specific to masculinity but, rather, are useful to understand the (trans)formation of technology, more generally. Barad (2003), in building her onto-epistemology, makes use of insights from Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, and so on, but she does not specifically address gender and feminism, as such. 76For example, a mine truck is not just the physical truck—the same truck is also defined by its use, marketing, and so on. Meaning, technology is a sociotechnical product, in that it is the result of the interplay of the “hard” (mechanical components and the like) and “soft” (its use, marketing, and so on) parts. Goodman and Garber (1988), in their sociotechnical study of mines, note the difference between general configurations of technology (e.g., the physical mine truck) and the

67 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework view is immensely malleable and can be inscribed with symbols, values, and so on. In this light, the design of technology continues long after the physical artefact has left the laboratory, with non-technical (social) factors having as much influence as technical factors, on the whole. Wajcman (2004, 34) notes that previous social studies of technology have “rejected the notion that technology is simply the product of rational technical imperatives; that a particular technology will triumph because it is intrinsically the best.” She holds technical reasons to be vitally important, but she also holds that why these particular technical reasons were “chosen” is equally important. What appears as a (legitimate) technical reason depends on circumstances that inevitably involve social aspects. These choices doubly shape technology and its social implications. Meaning, “technology is a sociotechnical product, patterned by the conditions of its creation and use” (Wajcman 2004, 34). There is, in other words, no way of viewing technology in isolation. On the one hand, technical innovation builds upon previous technology as a part of a system, not as separate “devices” or components. Battery-technology for mining machines is not solely something enabled by batteries. Moreover, technology’s entry into the field is due to political decisions, as well; taxing diesel so that batteries appear as economically more feasible, for example, or requiring that air quality be of a certain standard (see Paper IV), while at the same time battery technology having already been made popular by car manufacturers. On the other hand, because technology also has to enter into a system, it must navigate a complex space of requirements (Wajcman 2004). These requirements can be technical, economic, organisational, political, and cultural. The common view (especially from an instrumental/rationalistic perspective) is that technologies are refined over time such that their performances and abilities to solve problems are increased and, thus, their adoption will increase. Instead, Wajcman (2004, 36) argues “that it is not necessarily technical efficiency, but rather the con- tingencies of sociotechnical circumstances and the play of institutional interests that favour one technology over another” (my emphasis). Eveland (1986) relates similar points. Accepting that technology is information, the transfer of technology is the communication and use of that information. Thus, the metaphors used to describe technology become important. What we chose to liken particular technology to also affects its reception, use, etc. As well, there is also a permanence to the ensuing metaphors; Eveland argues that, once the likeness of a technology is established as connected to something, it is unlikely that the resulting “definition” will be revised.77 Thus, objects and practices become their own entities

unique configurations of the same technology at particular sections of a mine. The unique configurations of technology at a mine face, for example, depend upon factors such as environmental conditions and the necessary use of technology to adapt to those conditions. 77Eveland’s example is of computers being likened to typewriters, that is, something with which

68 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ that, in turn, serve as metaphors for new ideas and objects. This is another way in which technology builds upon previous innovations and technologies. Additionally, the values attached to a particular metaphor are also influenced by the institutional environment. Moreover, technology will mean different things to different people; with a multitude of viewpoints, what is valued by one may be a disaster for another (especially if having let “the costs and benefits to be defined according to the perspective of only a limited part of the participants”; Eveland 1986, 311). In this theoretical perspective, the institutional environment partly forms what constitutes technical reasons or motivations for developing and using technology. In part, for example, there are “the divergent requirements and assumptions of technology developers and users” (Wajcman 2004, 37). Wajcman uses the term “interpretative flexibility” to refer to the evolving view of what technology is as it is implemented and used. Similar to Eveland, she argues that “Different groups of people involved with a technology can have very different understandings of that technology, including different understandings of its technical characteristics” (Wajcman 2004, 37).78 This flexibility in interpretation means that criteria for judging technology as functional (or not) are not instrumental/rationalistic measures; the criteria are, rather, dependent on the extent to which the technology has been accepted by relevant social groups (Wajcman 2004). Such criteria for assessing technology in this way are political as much as they are technical: Sometimes such complex decision criteria are compatible, allowing “win-win” solutions to be formulated; sometimes situations are truly zero-sum and someone has to lose … [T]he problem of multiple criteria of assessment is [a] dynamic problem posed by the political nature of organizations … (Eveland 1986, 315.) Stabilisation of technology can still occur, though, because “some artefacts become increasingly the dominant form of the technology” (Wajcman 2004, 38). Or, certain criteria for judging technology become institutionalised in favour of others. On these grounds, problems relating to the design, development, transfer, and implementation of technology come down to being perceived differently by, or meaning

to write documents. This instead of, for example, computational machines (which the name still suggests). Computers, thus, at least in a traditional office setting, are used for writing and preparing documents, instead of being a more general tool; then, software being developed for computers continues in this vein. Organisations may be unwilling to go back on such definitions either because of the effort required (changing infrastructure, re-educating the workforce, and so on), or because organisations want to appear as consistent and not contradictory in their actions (see Røvik 2008 and the next section). 78Still, technology is not “infinitely plastic and tractable.” Wajcman argues that artefacts impose limits for how we can interpret technology. This is similar to how, in sociotechnical thought, the technical system erects boundaries around the social system.

69 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework different things to, different people. This variance in perception is partly structural and not random; designer and user are remote from each other, and values can vary considerably between groups (Wajcman 2004 notes, for example, that designers are generally men and thus make technology “male,” while consumers are women). Fur- thermore, the creation of symbolic meaning does not stop with the design phase— meaning is further encoded in marketing, retailing, and appropriation by users,79 all of which lead to the social shaping of technology. If technology is both information and malleable, traditional notions of technology may fall short of providing actual explanations. The problem with that fact, in the view of Eveland (1986, 303), is that “our technology has … outstripped the ability of many organizations … to make productive use of it.” This thesis implies that we can neither dictate the use of technology nor directly influence it. Thus, the processes surrounding technology use, and the characteristics of technology itself, remain targets for this thesis’ endeavour. The problem of making productive use of technology (a problem that is of interest to Eveland), is a problem of implementation. This predicament, in turn, is a matter of understanding “how does [the] tool help [someone] do something valuable” and, at the same time, that “if what [one seeks] to transfer does not facilitate the achievement of [these] goals, [one is] unlikely to succeed” (Eveland 1986, 305); these goals are as likely to be normative to the same extent that they are technical. Though not a position without demur, the following statement brings us to the next part of this chapter: “technology transfer is a function of what individuals think—because what they do depends on those thoughts, feelings, and interests” (Eveland 1986, 310, emphasis in original). The symbolic meanings of technology must, thus, have significant bearing on analysis—in this way, technology seems to behave much like ideas.

Technology as the Travel and Implementation of Ideas

The literature regarding the travel of ideas concerns the spread of ideas (mostly in the form of management concepts) within and between organisations. The application of the notion (of travel of ideas) to technology and sociotechnology is, to my knowledge, rarer. Part of this lack may be due to the notion’s assumed attention to malleable subject matter (which, traditionally, technology is not) in the travel-of-ideas literature. Yet, with the reconceptualisation of technology as something soft, something indeed malleable, the travel-of-ideas field lends much insight to the issues of concern in this thesis. The study of the travel of ideas is an extensive tradition; as such, this section will rely on Røvik (2008) to provide a summary of the field.

79Wajcman argues that it is gendering that does not stop in the design phase but that continues throughout. Again, I argue that these mechanisms are general beyond gendering.

70 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

Røvik focuses of on two paradigms in the field: A modern and rational perspective and a social-constructivist perspective.80 The first perspective, while diverse, has three common denominators: a fundamental optimism for progress and development; the belief in organisations and organisation; and an optimism in science and knowledge. Social constructivism, the second perspective, Røvik (2008) argues as often standing opposite to the modernistic perspective. Social constructivism has three base characteristics: one, the socially constructed reality in which organisations see themselves as having to follow nature-given rules, wherein these rules, in reality, are socially constructed; two, a skepticism towards organisational science; and three, a skepticism towards instrumentalism, or the idea that organisations only are tools that fulfil certain goals (instead of being arenas for the development and interpretation of symbols). Røvik strives to understand management ideas and organisational “recipes.” In particular, he focuses on the supply of these ideas and recipes as well as their transfer and reception.81 In the case of supply, he is interested in the supply of “products” (the market for ideas) and their content, form, and volume (the product and producers). For the former—the products—the market for these is important because it reflects values (these values must correspond to those of the users, as the previous section argued). This also offers an explanation for discrepancies between what the technology is said to be able to do, or what it is, and what it can actually do. For the latter—the content and form—a sociotechnical analysis must consider who forms technology and how this affects its character. In the second case, the transfer and reception of organisational ideas, Røvik takes interest in both decontextualisation and contextualisation. Decontextualisation is the process in which an organisational idea is extracted from its original organisational setting.82 This process is relevant to understanding how technology can move from one context to another (e.g., battery-powered vehicles from the car industry or safety programmes from other industries or companies). Contextualisation is the process in which organisational ideas are introduced into a new organisational context. This process adapts the individual tools and practices of a concept (and, by extension, the concept itself) to fit into the new context. For the purpose of this thesis, this process can answer questions relating to what happens to technology when it makes its way into mining organisations. In terms of sociotechnology, both processes, decon-

80In an earlier publication (Røvik 2000), Røvik makes the distinction between a tool perspective (stemming from a rational–instrumental tradition) and a symbol perspective (stemming from neo- institutional, organisational ethnographic, and constructivist traditions). 81Røvik (2008) is very picky with the particular words for these mechanisms; the original words do not translate well into English, but, for example, he specifically talks of överförandet and mottagandet (although these terms are translated into Swedish from Norwegian). These words are, in turn, separate from förmedlande and implementerandet. I attempt to mostly adhere to his distinction. 82An example from Paper I: the practices of Toyota being formulated into lean production by Liker (2004) and Womack and Jones (2003).

71 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework textualisation and contextualisation, involve interactions between technologies (e.g., tools, practices) and the people affected by them. The use of these ideas links the external/institutional environment with the socio-organisational level on down to the work system. Sociotechnical scholars are aware of such mechanisms. Mumford (2006, 339), for instance, notes that organisational change often is catalysed by “the thinking and writing of consultants and academics and by the behaviour of competitors” and even that these “can be just the latest fad of a powerful communicator.” She notes, too, how both economic climate and business cultures can lock organisations into certain ways of thinking, such as the need for minute control (see also Abrahamsson, Johansson, and Sandkull 2019). However, these considerations seem, in general, to be excluded from sociotechnical analysis, while they do stand to offer important input for bringing about sociotechnical change. Røvik (2008) does not find the current paradigms wholly suitable for his endeavour of explaining the travel of organisational ideas. The modernistic perspective explains the market for organisational ideas with reference to the dramatic growth of the number of organisations and increased global competition (growth that requires new ideas for how to achieve rational production, for exampl)e. The modernistic perspective also sees producers of organisational ideas as managers, consultants, and researchers. Resulting products, in the modernistic perspective, are fit-for-purpose tools meant for the rational management and design of organisations. As for decontextualisation, because organisations are seen as universal and made up of similar systems, practices are viewed as being directly extracted and transferred from one organisation to another. The task then, in the decontextualisation, is to create an as-exact-as-possible representation of the ideas. Contextualisation, in turn, becomes a cost–benefit decision by rational managers and—assuming that the ideas are implemented correctly (and usually in a top-down process)—also a task of “instrumental installation.” Likewise, the social-constructivist perspective has explanations for both supply as well as transfer and reception. Røvik (2008) describes this tradition as one that explains that the market for organisational ideas is an increased belief in organisations as system-like. With more organisations understanding themselves in this way, there is a bigger market for ideas for how such organisations should be designed. At the same time, organisations have to adopt these ideas to appear modern. In this perspective, popular ideas are symbols of modernity and rationality, rather than tools based on experience and knowledge. Therefore, producers of ideas are not necessarily actors with a lot of experience with the particular ideas, but, rather, they are skilful in packaging the ideas such that they appear as tools and symbols for organisational mod- ernisation. Decontextualisation does not interest the social-constructivist tradition, Røvik (2008) claims (since ideas are not tools in this view, there are no organisations to learn from). The contextualisation of ideas, in this perspective, is reduced to ideas

72 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

being façades that mostly equip organisations with a “legitimising rhetoric” (Røvik 2008, 43) while actual practice remains unchanged.83 Being unsatisfied with the explanations offered by the two paradigms (or, rather, finding advantages and drawbacks to both), Røvik proposes a “third way,” a middle road between the two paradigms: institutional pragmatism. Within this, Røvik (2008, 44) attempts to “develop and occupy a pragmatic position, which is inspired by both the modernistic and social-constructivist paradigm but that, at the same time, is a distinct position between the two” (my translation, emphasis in original). This new perspective by Røvik acknowledges the inherent ambiguity of the phenomenon of the “travel” of organisational ideas; where the two other traditions attempt to give singular explanations to the phenomenon, institutional pragmatism seeks to identify the foundations of the ambiguity. At the same time, while addressing shortcomings in the classic perspectives, Røvik (2008) argues that neither approach can be discounted empirically and that both mechanisms are present and also interwoven in a complex manner. In this way, in sum, in institutional pragmatism ideas can be tools with instrumental effects as well as socially-constructed symbols with legitimising effects. This view provides a different understanding for the market of ideas. Røvik (2008) reasons that, because popular management ideas are symbols for rationality and modernity, stories about how well ideas function as tools are what determine their legitimising power. Where Røvik critically distinguishes this reasoning from the that of neo-institutionalists is in arguing that such a process must happen through a “reality modus”; the stories, in Røvik’s view, are like those of a documentary rather than fiction. According to Røvik, a producer of organisational ideas must be understood, then, as someone who understands the actual effect of the ideas and how the ideas can be socially authorised. Røvik (2008) thus describes the processes of decontextualisation and contextualisation as depending on the same complex and double logic. For example, the “requesters” of organisational ideas (e.g., organisations or managers) understand themselves as rational actors wanting to solve real problems facing them or their organisations. At the same time, “requesters” are driven towards adopting the ideas because

83This tradition has long tried to explain the rise, fall, and spread of ideas with reference to fashion, Røvik being among those who have made such attempts (e.g., Røvik 1996). Fashion theory suggests that there are organisational fashions just as there are other fashions, and that organisational fashions largely function in the same ways as other fashions. In this view, an organisation adopts new organisational ideas so as to appear modern. If the organisation is successful, other organisations will follow and adapt the same ideas, so as to appear modern, also. However, as more organisations adopt these ideas, the ideas will become less fashionable. As such, some organisations try to find new ideas that will make them appear more modern again. If these organisations are successful, others will follow them. Lately, though, Røvik (particularly in Røvik 2011) and others have criticised the fashion theory’s ability to explain many of the behaviours that organisations exhibit in relation to organisational ideas.

73 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework they are presented as rational instruments (or symbols for rational instrumentality). Røvik (2008) maintains that this is not just a seeming ambiguity that can be shed so as to reveal the actor’s true motives through deeper investigations—the ambiguity, according to Røvik, is fundamental. Sociotechnology is already concerned with values (for example with democratising and humanising work). In fact, Mumford (2006) argues that the most important thing sociotechnical design can bring is its value system. It is important to realise, then, that the representation of these values go beyond actual properties of change processes or technology development; these processes must symbolically represent such values, as well. Røvik (2008) continues in this vein by developing two theories: a “virus” theory and a translation theory. The latter introduces translators as people who translate organisational ideas between contexts. Understanding the travel of ideas in this view becomes understanding what it takes to be a good “translator” and how to make good translations, as well (Paper I is concerned with this theory). The former (“virus”) theory views the entry of organisational ideas into organisations to be similar, metaphorically, to how viruses enter a host body (see Røvik 2000, 2008, 2011 for more in-depth descriptions of “virus” theory). While of some applicability to this thesis, rather than focusing on these views, I will instead rely on a synthesising of the three theoretical lines to understand the creation of attractive workplaces in the mining industry. In this way, I apply an understanding of different actors and their relative positions to the work system.

The Location and Interaction of Actors

Being a thesis on workplace attractiveness, this is also, by default, a thesis on technology; technology makes up a large portion of the mining industry’s workplaces, and interventions into workplaces will be based in technology. Thus, the effect and form of technology are central to analysis. The effect and form of technology arise from decisions—formal and informal, directly and indirectly—by different actors. Here, I will discuss the makers of such decisions as “designers”—they are one category of actors within sociotechnical systems. Other actors include individuals in the work system (e.g., workers) who are affected by decisions regarding technology. Actors outside the system, in the socio-organisational or external environment, can also shape technology.84 How actors make decisions, how they perceive decisions and the work system, and so on—and, by extension, how properties of the system, in general, will emerge—can all be understood as dependent on three constructs: the

84In Paper IV, I make a distinction between actors and individuals. There, I refer to “actors” as only those persons who have a direct and formal way of influencing technology. I note that actors, too, are individuals, however I forego defining all individuals as actors.

74 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ preferences85 of the actor, the actor’s views of the work system, and the work system’s actual properties (properties as in both emergent and of components). The preference of the actor refers to what an actor prefers, or does not prefer, in terms of work system characteristics. This does not necessarily mean specific preference to a certain system—preference can be general. Nor does it matter if this individual is in the work system or in the external environment, an applicant or employee, etc. Ehrhart and Ziegert (2005), in their review of theories of attractiveness, refer to preference as person characteristics, a notion that then, in turn, includes theories that predict attraction depending on the fit between person characteristics and environmental characteristics (see below). With reference to the previous section, it is also helpful to think in terms of legitimacy. As noted above, actors may choose to adopt an idea or technology to legitimise themselves and their actions. An individual has notions of what is legitimate or not (i.e., analogous to person characteristics, as in Ehrhart and Ziegert 2005), which, in turn, helps further understand which “legitimising actions” are to be taken and how they are perceived. The location of the actor becomes important when taking into consideration the actor’s views. The actor’s view of the work system represents what an actor thinks of a particular work system (in their review, Ehrhart and Ziegert 2005 refer to this concept as the “perceived environment”). This is, in part, analogous to metaphors for technology as discussed by Eveland (1986), while it differs from the actual properties of the work system (called “actual environment” by Ehrhart and Ziegert 2005) which is independent from the actor. Here, an actor is external when they judge the work system indirectly, from either the socio-organisational or external environment. In this case, an image of the work system stands in for its actual properties, and this image is “constructed” by the company through its communications, by employees of the work system talking with others about the system, and so on. If the actor is internal, meaning within the work system, the actor then has direct access to the properties of the work system. Still, this does not guarantee that actors’ views fully overlap with properties, as metaphors still mediate the views (however, in Paper IV,I argue that view and properties are likely to be the same). Theories accounted for by Ehrhart and Ziegert (2005) concern how individuals process information about actual characteristics, and how the processing, in turn, results in perceived characteristics affecting attractiveness. The external environment is not passive; it can influence the work system and its properties. For example, laws can mandate that technology has a specific design. The external environment also affects the preferences of actors through norms and the like.

85The term “preferences” is perhaps not the most suitable word. Beyond attractiveness, “preferences” is intended to represent understandings of the actors, that is, what an actor understands to contribute to safety, sustainability, and so on—or, alternatively, what constitutes a solution to the problem and, indeed, what that problem is.

75 Chapter 4 Theoretical Framework

In the case of an actor undertaking legitimising actions (e.g., implementing a particular management idea), the external—or rather, institutional—environment influences what actions are considered legitimate. At the same time, actors are, themselves, a part of the external environment and thus affect it, as well. This can be illustrated in how actors adapt the technical system and, through this, the work system as a whole. Actors form, and are formed by, the external environment; the work system forms, and is formed by, the external environment. Properties of the work system has effects on the surrounding environment; if it involves unhealthy tasks, people will get sick, and this can cause the external environment to impose new laws or change its opinions about the work system. The external environment rarely directly affects the work system, however. Instead, actors—system designers, for example—are affected, who in turn influence the work system. These actors have their own preferences and views. An analysis of attractive workplaces in the mining industry must capture these different views and preferences; from there, we can come to understand a process of interaction between the technical and the social. The process of capturing these views is the subject of the next chapter.

76 Chapter 5 Methods, Material, and Process

The empirical material for this thesis comes from projects that have sought to address the work environment—often specifically to increase the attractiveness of mining workplaces—of the mining industry. This thesis provides an understanding of the interaction between technological and social factors in the creation of attractive workplaces; this is an investigation into the process, along with the characteristics of technology, that can facilitate this endeavour. The previous chapter suggested that such an understanding requires insight into the different views of those affected by technology as well as those forming that technology. Gaining such insight in this way is, by extension, an investigation into interdependencies between systems, components, levels, and so on. For this task, empirical material that stems from different and varying projects provides a solid foundation. These projects, as Chapter 2 detailed, have dealt with different aspects of the mining industry, work environment, as well as technology, and the projects have thus been able to provide accounts of interdependencies and contrasting views. Due to the fact that there are many projects involved, there are also many different methods within them. The purpose here is not to go into too much detail of individual methods and their application. Rather, this chapter aims to provide a general account of the methods and their applications, motivating their usage. Some comments on the notion of action research are necessary before continuing, given the strong ties between action research and sociotechnical design. Action research is the type of research that either intends to change work situations or leads to change inadvertently because the research itself has been undertaken (Mumford 2006). Action research has a long history and a large body of literature. I have not actively made use of action research literature in conducting my research, nor have I considered my approach to have been one of action research. However, the research projects underlying this thesis have certainly intended to change work situations. And, due to the ways in which some of the research projects were designed, aspects of the projects that I was involved in intended to influence how technology was developed. At the same time, Mumford (2006) argues action research to be more of a philosophy than a methodology—a philosophy of a process and humanistic set of principles associated with technology and change. These principles have a clear presence in

77 Chapter 5 Methods, Material, and Process my process86 (see also Lindelöf 2006 and his comments regarding an action research approach within a similar thesis).

On Using Qualitative Data

Almost all of the data that supports this study is qualitative.87 Data sources include interviews, observations, workshops, and documents. The few cases of quantitative data come from statistics. This section will look at the general justification for using qualitative source material in the context of the papers and projects, by referring two themes of the thesis88—workplace attractiveness and safety.89 Many studies regarding safety rely on quantitative data and apply statistical analysis (e.g., Blank, Diderichsen, and Andersson 1996; Muzaffar et al. 2013), especially when investigating safety over time. The investigations into safety conducted within this thesis studied the measures undertaken by the Swedish mining industry to reduce the occurrence of workplace accidents. The same investigations also sought to establish what is thought was, and is, needed of past and future interventions to reduce accidents. This sentiment aligns with seeking to investigate how managers, designers, and others think of and perceive issues of, for example, workplace attractiveness and its management. These investigations, in other words, did not investigate casual ef-

86Earlier versions of this thesis attempted to position my theoretical and empirical standpoint within pragmatism; these arguments are now gone, mostly, in the final version. I still consider my approach to be pragmatic, and I believe sociotechnical thought harmonises well with pragmatism. 87An earlier version of this thesis held that the methods of the thesis were largely qualitative. I continued along that line by saying that, even where statistics had been utilised (i.e., quantitative data), they were “used” qualitatively. Åsberg, Hummerdal, and Dekker (2011) argue that only data can be can be quantitative or qualitative, not methods or analyses. Essentially, their position is that interviews can generate quantitative data if one is concerned with the frequency of certain words, etc. Attaching such terms to analyses is not productive, because the concern is what the analysis is of. Thus, I only use the terms for data. Some quotes make references to “qualitative research”; this should be taken to mean “research that relies on qualitative data.” 88Paper I did not focus on these topics (although the topics of that paper are relevant for both safety and workplace attractiveness). Even if the arguments in this section are not fully applicable to Paper I, I think that the paper’s aims and the state of that field make it clear that qualitative data is most appropriate (if for no other reason than the fact that there simply was not enough material to provide worthwhile quantitative data). 89In the projects that dealt specifically with workplace attractiveness, the general argument was that it is an extension of health and safety. It was held that health and safety entail not just making sure workplaces are safe and healthy, but that people should want to work in them, too. The division between attractiveness and safety introduced here is because some projects have focused, specifically, on safety. While the topics of the projects rely on the same justification for choice of approach and methods, the study of safety provides some clearer examples. It is worth noting, as well, that the safety projects also made explicit reference to workplace attractiveness, in that improving the safety of the workplaces of the mining industry is a step in making them attractive.

78 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’

fects, so using quantitative data was neither viable nor possible. A statistical analysis of the kind undertaken in Blank, Diderichsen, and Andersson (1996), for example, requires an understanding of historical and contemporary technological developments and other measures so that categories can be formed. Such studies, that establish these categories, are not available for recent decades; the safety studies underpinning this thesis have interest in determining these safety measures.90 As such, the studies investigated how people in the mining industry with significant influence over these issues reasoned about the subject. This studying of subjective understanding necessitates methods such as interviews. As Flick says, “The main reason for using qualitative research should be that a research question requires the use of this sort of approach and not a different one” (Flick 2014, 12, emphasis in original). At the core of safety, as a measure when it is performing well, is the absence of workplace accidents (though see, e.g., Reason 1997; Beus, McCord, and Zohar 2016). However, a quantitative approach is not in the position to measure the absence of something.91 Safety also tends to deal with the potential for accidents, which is a diffuse concept and defies direct measurement. Additionally, not only dedicated “safety measures” affect safety—other and sometimes indirect factors also play a significant role. To get a bearing on the issue, a first step would be, for example, to establish what mining companies, their representatives, and other experts consider to have influenced safety in the first place. Flick (2014) provides similar reasoning, detailing that, even if the frequency of a phenomenon and where it occurs (e.g., the frequency of mental health issues within certain social classes, or accidents of certain occupational groups) can be established with quantitative data, the direction (e.g., how accident rates are related to certain factors and the direction of any relation) needs qualitative data. In other words:

The goal of [this kind of] research then is less to test what is already known (e.g., theories already formulated in advance): rather it is to dis- cover and explore the new and to develop empirically grounded theories. Here the validity of the study does not exclusively follow abstract academic criteria of science as in quantitative research: rather it is assessed with reference to the object under study. (Flick 2014, 16.)

90The initial ambition of the first of the safety projects was to conduct studies in the vein of Blank et al. (the working name of that project was “Blank 2.0”); the shift towards interviews and the like was partly due to finding that there was not sufficient material available to conduct the study in such a manner. 91This is simplification of larger discussion. And, to a certain extent, the studies did in fact take the decrease in accident rate from one period to another to represent increased safety. However, such measures are strictly comparative at best, and they are misguiding at worst. Big disasters—for example, the BP Texas City refinery explosion (see Hopkins 2009)—were neither predicted nor were they indicated by high accident rates.

79 Chapter 5 Methods, Material, and Process

For the subject matter of attractiveness, the reasoning looks much the same as it does as for safety. That is, concepts such as workplace attractiveness can be similarly diffuse. Attractiveness, for instance, cannot be measured as such;92 attractiveness, like safety, is an emergent system property (Carayon et al. 2015). Work systems as ultimately attractive depend on perceptions stemming from the interplay between the design of technology (and those who design it), those who use it, and even the surrounding society. Insight into this interplay, and especially in the early stages that the study of attractiveness, overall, still finds itself in, must come largely from qualitative data. Meaning, understanding how decisions are made, and how the effects of those decisions have come to be perceived, is not deducible from quantitative data. From a practical standpoint, for attractiveness (in the context of the mining industry), quantitative data does not exist. While research on workplace, job, or work attractiveness exists, the subject itself is not mature; the measure of attractiveness, I would argue, is still not possible beyond some rudimentary cases.93 In the view of Flick (2014), such a situation is one that motivates the use of qualitative data (and explorative studies tend to be qualitative, even in subjects of engineering). A central point of the collection and subsequent analysis of data in this thesis is that these research activities have not striven for empirical generalisation. I have, instead, opted for analytical generalisation (see below; see also Jensen and Sandström 2016; Yin 2014). Thus, this thesis relies on the position of the source (e.g., the informant, in the case of interviews) to lend analytical strength to the data. Therefore, in reviewing the individual data collection methods, positioning the sources becomes important; after reviewing the methods, I discuss how the material is lent analytical strength.

Verbal Data: Interviews and Workshops

Verbal data makes up the majority of the empirical material of this thesis, and the data originates from interviews and a workshop. The interviews exist in two categories: expert interviews and “traditional” interviews. Tbl. 5.1 gives an overview of these interviews, the majority of which were in the form of expert interviews (see Flick 2014.) The questions of the investigations of thesis were such that experts were best positioned to answer them. Who qualifies as an expert may be up for debate, but

92At least this is what I claim in Paper IV. Others would argue that attractiveness can be measured, and they do measure it (by using surveys or looking at which companies attract the most new labour)—it is this conception of attractiveness, however, that Paper IV positions itself against. 93With the lack of quantitative data as such, there is a problem in claiming that the mining industry is, in fact, unattractive. Yet, mining companies themselves subscribe to the view that their industry is struggling in the recruiting of labour. While such a view may be an “institutional” assertion (roughly, the way the current problems of the mining industry are being described without the root cause being this per se), a qualitative approach is still useful here, as it allows for perceptions and the like to be taken into account.

80 ‘Soft’ Questions in a ‘Hard’ Industry?’ this thesis relies on Deeke (in Flick 2014, 227) on this matter, who argues that experts are those who are “particularly competent as authorities on certain matter of facts.” Expert interviews are not simply ordinary interviews conducted with experts; where a traditional interview is interested in the interviewee as a “study object,” expert interviews are interested in the informants’ capacities as experts, rather than as individuals.

Table 5.1: The projects of the thesis.